Adhocism, by Charles Jencks – review

Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some exculpatory, older and wiser material fore and aft). Adhocism (re)captures with magical realism the boldness and silliness of its day.  This was the day when ‘new media’ meant colour television.

Younger readers may need more instruction on the nature of this spirit. Students in Paris hurled St Germain cobblestones at gendarmes in clouds of teargas and students at Hornsey College of Art sat in to protest I cannot quite remember what in clouds of pot smoke. The Parisians read Guy Debord on situationism, the Hornseyites drooled over nudes in the International Times. Meanwhile, students in architecture schools fretted about ‘coherent articulation with diverse subsystems’.

Although the original was not published until 1972, its co-author Charles Jencks claims to have coined the term ‘adhocism’ four years earlier, perhaps in a cloud of pot smoke while listening to the Beatles’ White Album and admiring its Richard Hamilton sleeve. Since charming fabulation, cosmic speculation, glazed theorising, bizarre reference and brazen self-quotation are very much Jencks’s métier, this might or might not be true. No matter, Adhocism was one of the great architecture books of its day.  And for connoisseurs of techno-bohemianism, might yet become one again.

It is an argument for improvisation and libertarianism in building design, an energetically muddled rebuttal of high modernism’s inflexible geometry and equally inflexible social theories. Here, in grainy black and white, you find (as exemplars of longed-for architectural freedoms) images of Soviet Mil Mi-10 skycrane helicopters lifting prefabs, a hip-flask disguised as a learned tome, a lady in Margate who lived in a Obus and (I specially like this one) ‘a chair no longer adequate as a seat becom[ing] something else’.