| Summary: | This study seeks to be a reflection on the contemporary architecture of housing, particularly focused on examples produced recently, since the beginning of the new millennium. The Present is the target of a number of mutations that are actually changing practices and perception of architecture: new technologies, the media, the internationalization of the practice, the emergence of consumption, changes in the notion of space and time. All these aspects have a huge influence on the architecture, significantly changing the way of doing it. The collection of initial data, revealed a high density and diversity of examples, among which, there was a very particular set of examples that have raised an interest and need for deeper study, from which resulted the present investigation. The examples contained in this reference set, contain at least one of the following features: minimum housing, small sized; low cost; formal and structural modularity; 'type' or 'model' housing; industrialization, construction by components, prefabrication, standardization; self-project; self-construction. From the exhaustive analysis of this group of examples, we could finally establish the subject of the study, figured in the recent self-project virtual platforms associated with the housing market. Thus, we seek in this work, to verify the relations of legitimacy, usefulness and limitations of these digital systems of self-design, in today's culture and society, as well as within the discipline of architecture. It discusses the identity of these systems as promoters of consumption or service providers, while marketing agents or social professionals. Like the current changes observed in the ways of making, constructing and negotiating architecture, we found in Adolf Loos, a strong analogy to the contemporary state of the discipline. The study of his work not only allowed a more enlightened opinion about the role of the architect and architecture, but also an understanding of architecture as a whole, built from the combination of several elements in an unified, global, system. From Loos, we realize that despite the undoubted technological, cultural and social changes, which are both fruit and consequence of world progress, as well as the adaptability and evolution of the discipline to follow this reality, exists in architecture and housing, as History also shows, constants, that persist and maintain the discipline as we know it, Architecture.
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