A good example of the enrichment of projects through various personal contributions based on thought, is the work of Enric Miralles. The present article analyses two projects of the first competitions in Germany (1991), with the intention of exposing their imaginative processes; exploring very diverse sources with which, through his unique way of ‘drawing’ and ‘anotating’, he builds a mental process to turn it into an architectural project that generates innovative perceptions. The research is placed squarely in the contemporary debate of the valuation of poetic architecture, understood as the one which conceals a world of ideas under the forms, or an architecture that also commits itself to social challenges; framed in a way of working that in the words of Miralles wanted ‘to understand and to make understood’.