Tom Kligerman, of Ike Kligerman Barkley, was showing me his new 3D printer the other day. His firm specializes in high-end houses, mostly though not exclusively traditional in design. Their printer, about the size of a Smart Car, is used to produce iterative study models that are extremely detailed, as if made by a Swiss watchmaker or a particularly obsessive ship-in-the-bottle hobbyist. 3D printers are all the rage in architecture schools. I can see why they’re popular with students. It’s sort of like having an in-house professional modelmaker—he can make even your half-baked efforts look good. But is it a good learning tool? I doubt it. 3D printers are capable of printing anything, buildable or unbuildable, functional or dysfunctional, sensible or nonsensical. It is not that acquiring modelmaking skills makes you a better architect, but the process of building models—like the act of sketching—does teach you about design. It takes several hours to print a complex shape, and I suspect that the demand on 3D printer time in schools will preclude them being used as iterative design tools. They will just make pretty models.