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.
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