With due interpretative caution and trying not to fall into simplification or cliché, it could be stated that the "rational" mind learns with "pure concepts" based mainly on the understanding of the essence and attributes of their objects of knowledge. The "logical" mind, on the other hand, learns to unravel the theoretical consequences of a formula within an abstract language. On its side, the "creative" mind of the designer acquires and achieves the object of knowledge -creativity- through a deep understanding of already completed designs. This paper aims to delve into the process of analysis of design examples, a process that could somehow resemble Alchemy, in which the alembic could be the pencil. Drawing is the analytical tool that allows the designer to distil the essence of the studied references departing from the overflow of images that arrive to the eye. With the gathering of different successful design examples, the designers build up a repository stocked in their memory that enlarges their creative capacity when facing new challenges.

The task of developing a new teaching methodology to train young designers is not an easy one. Given the nature of the discipline, design education must deal with numerous complex and specific aspects in constant change: the mastery and management of creative processes; the balance between strong technical knowledge and good formal capacity; the tension between the application of industrial processes and the handling of artisanal techniques; the capacity to know the updated demands of a humanity in constant change; or the need to develop a rich - and critical - memory of project references. This, together with the current technological and digital paradigm, constantly changing, makes the formation of the designer a completely open debate. How, then, can a good design teaching strategy be designed?

Through four books on architecture and the visions of form championed by their authors, this article aims at a heterodox, inclusive and complex mode of seeing modern form: the open discourse. Defended by few architects at this date, this approach radically differed from the familiar stylistic or iconographic one. Through it, form no longer had to adapt to the invariably pre-established codes of the so-called "modern style" and rather emerged from the specific reality of each architectural project, which is precisely where its modernity lies. The four books are: Der moderne Zweckbau (1923) by Adolf Behne; Die Neue Baukunst (1929) by Bruno Taut; Der Sieg Des Neuen Baustils (1927) by Walter Curt Behrendt; and Gli elementi dell'architettura funzionale (1932) by Alberto Sartoris.

This chapter analyzes the existing tension between the experience of the city and the image of it, arguing that the designer is a creative agent that acts as a mediator between both poles. Although the growing primacy of the visual has marked the notion of cities throughout the twentieth century, this investigation presents two paradigmatic cases to illustrate the opposite: The idea that the conception of the city can-and probably should-start from experience, not so much from its image. These cases are the vision of Las Vegas that, as a manifesto, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour provide in 1972; and New Babylon that Constant Nieuwenhuys devised between the 1950s and 1960s. In the light of these cases, the text concludes by prompting-or rather by asking-what is the role of the contemporary designer in the city now that we are fully immersed in the twenty-first century.