The news is that a professor at Harvard University of Architecture has been charged with copying part of his thesis. A couple of years ago, the scandal of a plagiarism complaint by the Dean of Princeton opened, and we had the opportunity to follow the case more closely, as the copist was a Spanish architect who collected in a book the whole process he experienced. He launched the sewers of the higher academy saying that far from being the house of knowledge and free thought that is supposed to the organization, in exchange for maintaining power, he turns the faculty into a militant of an ideology. Both are plots to write a series based on real facts: declaring the copy as an unacceptable malicious act, it benefits from the morality of lying to keep secret structures of power that cannot be recognized.

However, reproduction has been allowed in the area of building design. In fact, the realization of architecture over long historical periods has been an exercise of reproduction of bases. A general and aesthetic guide of the construction was formed and the architect applied the norms adapting them to the local conditions, making architecture of the variants of the copy. However, in a building it is often difficult to report that it has been copied and there is scarce legal jurisprudence in the field of architecture. On the other hand, there is a need not to copy when contemporaneity has demanded originality from buildings. The architect makes great efforts to make his original creation easily recognizable, and for this he has resorted to spectacularity, to make a striking form.

Copying can be pedagogical in the university, once public action is taken, how much is learned to copy! In the attempt to copy there is always a personal discovery, because you can't copy it from the top down, and that's when the novelty and the original contribution, probably small and humble, appears. And so we recognize that architecture is a collective knowledge, a collective copy.