“Alvar Aalto: If a ferocious lion jumped in a window?”. The title of this paper is a simple questionthat surprises because it leads to change your point of view. This phrase is borrowed from Alvar Aaltobecause within it expresses a shocking case. It takes us like a “journey” that includes together menand animals in motion. For those who have ability to see everything around us can be a source oflearning , an essential factor to be considered in architectural projects. To support this theory sometravel sketches of the same Aalto are studied, which in some ways have similar characteristics to thequestions of his tales. Every question, every drawing contains a mysterious component to be clarified.The locations shown during the travel, from reality to paper, undergo a transfiguration useful to theproject in progress. From the “journey “ carnet also we discover assumptions made in the architectureof the Finnish master. The drawings show, in dialectical form the memory of a place. They are the resultof a rigorous and slow observation that amplifies the author’s sentiment and turns into a quickrepresentation of the deep feelings of his curious look. The graphic sign of the drawings is a virtuouscircle that reveals “architectural ideas” ( title of the book published in Italy in a series directed byGiuliano Glesleri in 1987). He puts on the same level the development of an architectural culture andits artistic expression. Reading these writings means to understand, through some aspects of Aalto’slife, how its architectural gestation is influenced by everything he sees. The collection of essays, in thiscontext, is a testament of Aalto’s design process who, as a travel diary, in fact tells so many differenttrips . For Aalto, the architect’s work also involves the work of the contructor and of the innovator,both for the design of a single house, and for the planning of a city. He not only designed cozy environmentswith organic characteristics, but through a combination of volumes and materials has createdplaces, spaces of great effect and “facilities” for man’s daily needs. Observe some of Aalto drawings,executed in Morocco and Sicily, is trying to emphasize and point out that everything we takenote, in every moment of our daily lives, is related to the person who has the ability to “see”, to relationsbetween inside and outside. It is a recognition in the architecture of Aalto that the context becomesa place in relation to the evolution of the project. Reading his writings, understanding the questionsasked also through his travel sketches, is an occasion to make teasure of all these experiences as“materials” of the project that will come back, even unconsciously, in suitable architectural projects.