ABSTRACT
The need for the avant-garde to be new, to be the first, would be amusing if it weren’t so self-defeating. Along with a practice that hasn’t yet matured formally is thrown away decades of research and development in environmental design, knowledge of which its critics are in embarrassing need. The software is perhaps the most far-reaching contribution anyone in the autonomous avant-garde has made thus far to changing the conventional pathways from design to construction. Structuralism was a profound influence on the development of architectural and urban research in the country, and fitted in nicely with the exigencies of computer programming, but it polarised opinion. The avant-garde designers design the rules appropriate to their objectives. Complexity Theory has engendered an attention to initial conditions – and assumptions – that render a more universal set of rules impossible.
