The architecture of the avant-garde was based on its practitioners’ certitude of having come up with an alternative to what was already there: a plan for a better world. With what Lyotard called the end of the great narratives, architecture lost this certainty and the utopia left behind was scorched earth. But in a development that went generally unnoticed at first, a new generation of visionaries began to tend this wasteland. Today, their field is abloom with the “retropia” of New Urbanism, which purports to redeem Modernism’s unfulfilled pledge of a better life in the post-historical present of an eternal yesterday. To this extent, New Urbanism is the de facto heir of the avant-garde, and not the least of the reasons why is that it can lay absolutely uncontested claim today to the public popularity that the avant-garde had postulated in rather prophylactic fashion back in its day. Thus, the topos of utopia is already occupied and no longer available to contemporary architecture, which has no alternative than to deal with the status quo. Architects — assuming that intervening in reality is even on their agenda — must face it and come to terms with it. Accordingly, it’s not “Fuck …” but rather “Face the Context” that becomes their motto. To do so, they have to renounce the avant-garde’s bipolar worldview in which architecture rides in like the good guy in the white hat to deliver society from the evils besetting it. That all-toofamiliar sermon preaching replacement of the conventional Old by the progressive New now gives way to a practice of mutation whereby it is precisely that which already exists that constitutes the material for its own renewal