BSc Architecture, Year 3
2010-2011 @ The Bartlett, University College London
TUTORS:// Max Dewdney + Chee Kit-Lai
PROGRAM:// ADHOCRACY
“The word is a portmanteau of the Latin ad hoc, meaning ‘for the purpose’, and the suffix -cracy, from the ancient Greek kratein, meaning ‘to govern’…”
(p6, ‘New Organizational Designs: Information Aspects’, By Bob Travica)
This year Unit 9 will question the conventional relationships between form, style and matter through an investigation of the Architecture of Adhocracy*. The Unit will create a new form of Ad-hoc architecture through inventive and appropriated architectural forms, components, symbols and technologies. We will immerse ourselves in the techniques of visual representation to explore the three main themes of the Unit; appropriation, change and power as strategies for developing designs for buildings. The outcome of the Unit will be the design of new icons of architecture, which aim to be ephemeral, fluid, adaptable, fluctuating, forgetting, disguised and poetic, through our investigations between London and Shanghai.
The idea of Adhocracy is interesting because it can shed a new light upon the contemporary political and cultural context of architecture. The historically strongly ‘branded’ Nation State is being increasingly challenged by forces that operate outside and beyond the state, from terrorists to oligarchs and from international non-governmental agencies to hedge-fund managers. This puts pressure upon the familiar iconography, or brand image, of the state, calling it into doubt. Seen within this context the recent revival of iconic buildings over the past 15 years or so now begins to look like mounting desperation, rather than growing confidence, in the power of monumental ‘icons’ to express contemporary human aspirations. Historically the identity of the British State and of its citizens is held through military, religious and legal structures, expressed in terms of iconic figures - from crowns, passports, myths, monuments, skylines, cultural artifacts and of course architecture. Adhocracy is in many ways an opposite form of expression to this kind of iconography and that is why it can be deployed as a critical tool to explore the current cultural context of architecture.
One example of an emerging Adhocracy is perhaps to be seen in unrecognised microstates, such as the Principality of Sealand , a former defense platform in the North Sea turned into a microstate by an eccentric British family or from Transdniestra, which is a breakaway region in the state of Moldova. A micronation can vary in scale from a 1:1 portal, to an entire city territory. We will use ideas of Adhocracy to re-examine our present conditions (environmental/material/social/political) to create immaterial, surprising, obscure, fantastical, hybrid, illusionary and magical alternative forms of buildings and architecture for the future.
* “By realizing his immediate needs, by combining ad hoc parts, the individual creates, sustains and transcends himself.”
(p15. ‘Adhocism: The Case For Improvisation’, by Charles Jencks & Nathan Silver)