New architects and new forms of practice. Congress of Architects of Spain 2009

The architect's daily work is changing before our eyes. Both the media society and the new means of production are radically transforming the way of doing architecture, not only in the constructive facet, but from the very foundations of the creative process. Access to enormous amounts of information, as well as the new study tools made available to us, mean that genius is cornered by the diffuse logic of the search for the project. Computers have gone from being mere drafters to powerful tools of formal generation, in which the old pillars of project production (idea-croquis-representation-construction) can be researched from a thousand starting points. There are computational tools within the reach of all of us architects today that can manage topologically defined geometries, which, far from the analytical and atomistic vision of serialization, are capable of maintaining complex relationships between the different areas of the same geometry, linking affections and provoking systemic behaviors in the forms produced. This places the discipline in an interesting position, where the lack of market possibilities in Spain provokes the need to refine the design tools that we have inherited from our masters.