ABSTRACT
In practicing their profession, architects evoke on paper or on screen images of the buildings they are conceiving for their clients so that they can decide that what the architects have conjured up for them is precisely what they want to build. Then the architects have to summon, by drawings, the same buildings for contractors who will imagine how to proceed in erecting them using what, socially, is considered the most cost-effective way. This double conjuring condition, dealing with the imagination of others, has become a stressful burden because of market conditions and societal circumstances. In the attempt to avoid such a burden, the consequences have been of two types. On the one hand, there is a group of architects who have become design-build professionals and therefore avoid the need of working with the imagination of the builder; as an additional consequence they can achieve a substantial reduction in the number of drawings necessary for the construction details by making them repetitive from building to building and consequently meaningless in specific situations. To convince their clients these design-build architects strengthen their authority by arguing that their architecture is an outcome of functional and constructively rational thinking since they know how to physically author their building. On the other hand, there is a select group of architects carrying out what they call a critical practice using visual public relations based on an over publishing of their design drawings when they are at the beginning of their career aiming to become starchitects.
