"(...) I like to sacrifice a lot, to see just what immediately attracts me, to walk randomly, without a map and with an absurd feeling of discoverer. (...) Suddenly, the pencil or the Bic start to fix images. (...) Shy traces first, stuck, inaccurate, then obstinately analytical, for an instant dramatically definitive, totally liberated; then fatigued and gradually irrelevant. In an interval of real voyage the eyes, and through them the mind, gain unsuspected capacity. We learn beyond measure; what we learn reappears, dissolved in the traces that we draw afterwards. "
(Álvaro Siza, Esquissos de Viagem, 1988, p. 15.)


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Álvaro Siza Vieira suggests that architecture is made by intuition stating that "the architect works by manipulating the memory, I have no doubt about it, consciously but most times subconsciously. Knowledge, information, the study of architects and architectural history tend or should tend to be assimilated, until they are lost in the unconscious or subconscious of each"
("Imaginar a Evidência", 1998:37).