ABSTRACT
The engaged avant-garde has been represented, first and foremost, since the 1970s, by a participatory architecture that seeks to undermine the profession’s paternalism through a heavy emphasis on user/community consultation. Second, by environmental design, itself as much concerned with the social effects of a dysfunctional environment as it is with the dysfunctional environment itself. Such negotiations are, happily, becoming redundant, as parts of both the autonomous and engaged avant-gardes begin to converge towards ‘performative’ form, algorithmic designs that have found a particular form in order to do a particular thing as elegantly as it is done in nature. The developing interrelations between generation and evaluation are potentially a source of both greater invention and greater rigour, with the caveat that the return to the world from the ‘overworld’ when designing needs to be seen as of governing importance.
