On the importance of drawing, Álvaro Siza says: ‘Drawing is a form of communication with oneself and with others... All gestures, including the gesture of drawing are filled with history, unconscious memory, and unpredictable anonymous wisdom.’ The significance of drawing is even more radically emphasized by Heinz Tesar: ‘Without drawing, architecture is impossible for me. Architecture is for me petrified water from a watercolour drawing.’

In attempting to write about Tesar’s work, the associative link to Álvaro Siza is not accidental since there are many reasons for finding parallels between the positions of the two architects within the corpus of contemporary European architecture.