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The Role of the Architect in the Age of Automatic Reproduction

This paper is a general reflection on the relationship between computer architectural education and professional practice or, in other words, the social role of architects. This reflection is grounded on the experience of the author as director of a Master program on computerized architectural projects and as professor of two general school courses: one consisting on a theoretical review of computer applications in architecture, the other consisting on a practical development of modeling and visualization techniques. The main argument is that little attention is being given in recent publications and CAAD conferences to the actual role of architect in society and that a big gap is growing between what is currently taught in architectural schools and what happens in real life. This gap has as one pole what is loosely called the «star system» of famous architects that create singular buildings and that constitute the main reference of our architectural culture and, as another pole, the rigid laws of the market that dictate the types of most residential buildings. This lack of attention manifests itself in the unbalanced weight of papers on multimedia, historical modeling or visualization techniques and papers on housing or architectural current elements analysis. Some very interesting lines of research, perhaps distorted due to an insufficient analysis of the general notion of type in architecture, have been abandoned without much comment. The conclusion is that a discussion on this line would perhaps help to define better the distance between computer craftsmanship and architectural education.