Adhocism

Notions of ‘Adhocism’ were coined by architectural designer, theorist, and sometime designer Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver in their book Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (1972). They considered the ways in which designers could take immediate action through the use of readily available components in ways that had never been conceived in their original design. Hippy communities in the United States had explored some of these ideas in the 1960s, as in Drop City, where dome dwellings were constructed from car roofs bought cheaply from scrapyards, reusing materials abandoned by the consumer society. Some positive aspects of this outlook were to be found in The Whole Earth Catalogue of 1968, an encyclopaedia of alternative ways of living and suppliers of the means of doing so.

Design, essentially a collage, where every part of a building, or each element of a building-complex, is designed with scant regard to the whole, and often involves disparate parts taken from catalogues.

Bibliography

• Jencks (1968, 1972)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
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