The paper presents a contribution to physical models teaching and learning in Architecture, whose process of design has been at the centre of the conceptual agenda worldwide and has unequivocal implications for professional education and formation, a debate somewhat dismissed and neglected in Brazil.

Professional formation has historically been based on a theory/practice separation. Future professionals are taught to replicate previously sintered knowledge by means of rigorous techniques in the solution of pre-defined problems in practice. This has recently been shaken by a notion that knowledge is a type of learning inherent to action. Students should produce their own knowledge while doing, aware of the action. Reflective thinking should be a critique of specialized repetition, allowing for new meanings to unique and uncertain situations, with their complexity, doubts, instabilities and value conflicts.

Architectural design is a creative process of gestation defying human capacity to propose solutions to concrete unexpected challenges. Problem definition, research, testing and discovery are implicit in it and should be part of the socially interactive formative years of future professionals, aiding students to develop their own research capacity and ability to search, select, analyse and register information, in a contextualized manner through the proposition of problems, turning learning meaningful, in an intelligent movement between immediate experience to abstract thinking and back to produce a general structure of knowledge.

Crucial in this context, models establish a third dimension to an area which deals directly with space, without intermediaries and pre-interpretations. They are instruments of design and construction of repertoire, which, in permanent collaboration with other means of representation and expression, each with their specific languages, make up the open set at the disposal of students and architects. They constitute the discourse of the author and anticipate what is not there.

Modelling disciplines in Architecture here, when present, are generally strictly technical and isolated. The scarce literature recommended is reflective of this, a conceptual literature being an exception. Models in teaching and learning are rare, purely representative artefacts of a final stage, not used flexibly in the process of design.

The course presented incorporates the ideas above. It considers that the challenge for tutors should be to move beyond their technical capabilities, helping students to avoid the prevalent ideas of a mechanical activity and to understand the production of meaning embodied in a symbolic object. Using unexpected materials, provoking surprising sensations, considering thinking as strongly identified with language, allows for the transformation and improvement of concepts and the ever growing tangibility and approximation between ideas and realization. Mastering its language improves the abilities of future architects to propose something different. Representation is not passive. It actively tries to convert that which is undetermined into something determined.

Evaluations of the course demonstrate that working conceptually with all the facets of this tool produces qualitative advances, and suggest that students have changed their structure of thinking from forms previously established. This is the focus of this paper, hoping to contribute to curricular improvements in Architecture.