Im`pro.vise, v.t. & v.i. 2. to make, provide or do with the tools and materials at hand, usually to fill an unforeseen and immediate need; as he improvised a bed out of leaves.

Webster's New 20th-Century Dictionary

One spring day in the early 1990s, I was having lunch at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, where I had spent profitable time in the library, and, on this occasion, I found myself sitting next to Richard Meier, the uncompromising Modernist architect. Meier, who had just won the commission to build the new complex on top of the Santa Monica mountains, was expanding on the content of his brief, and momentarily I must have forgotten whom I was talking to, and I said that, in my own experience, the best kind of building for academic or scholarly purposes was one that allowed for improvisation. I cited the mid-19th-century London house that had served my old philosophy department so well. My neighbour gathered himself up.

LRB 4 December 2003 | PDF Download