Everything seems to indicate that we are facing a new cultural paradigm. In a short time we have gone from architectural culture that was almost exclusively penned and technical to an eminently visual one. In a world abounding with images, images have ceased to be mere representations of things and have become charged with meaning. In this new paradigm, images are much more powerful and influential tha words, and architecture seems to have stopped being read as text and is now put forward as image. The visual or iconic image has become a new law that articulates new ways of doing architecture. Perhaps we might wonder if all these new paradigms do nothing but fall back on something already well known, something often rehearsed which has been leading us for some time, again and again, up the same dead-end alley: the ever seductive power of ‘the new’.