The traditional modern dialectic of ideal type and real context has been avoided, or rather replaced, by a more complex intercalation of intellectual narrative and material proposition. Here, the city, as existing, stands as the object and generator of so many possible futures, each calculated according to the nature of its opposition to those futures. The architectural project, while crystallizing one or more of these futures, is then presented to the city, so to speak, as a whole, not as a replacement or substitute, as in the utopian urbanism of modernism, but as a material to be submitted to the life and consuming power of the context.
Anthony Vidler, "Oneirism" from The Architectural Uncanny, 1992