Sjim Van Beijsterveldt
Borders & Territories
Ad Hoc Conditions: Adhocism as a Modus Operandi for Architectural Design
The historic city centre of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius is formed by an urban fabric consisting out of courtyards creating introverted voids within the traditional urban solid. These courtyards contrast the traditional and formal public spaces of the city by the way they operate on the levels of public-private accessibility, spatial compositions and architectural aesthetics. The ‘ad hoc’ manner by which these courtyards come into being gives them a unique heterogeneous, but ambiguous aesthetical quality. These phenomena led to the creation of a theoretical framework of in-depth research into adhocism and bricolage in the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology and architecture. This eventually led to the development of a methodology by using adhocist principles in the creation of architecture. By this way the process became more important than the product creating unconventional ways to deal with matters of context and program. The graduation project resulted in both a mythical as well as a manifesto product which tries to exemplify the qualities of the use of adhocist principles within architecture and how it helps to go beyond its conventions.