This article records impressions from a very interesting exhibition of drawings made by French architects of the 19th and 20th centuries that was recently on show in Athens. These architects, as many others of their colleagues, students at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in Paris, holders of scholarships of the French Academy,and then living in Rome for four years, started coming to Greece in 1845. The purpose of their stay was, in collaboration with the archaeologists, to submit to the Academy a complete study of a monument. The study comprised the full and detailed record of a monument in its “actual state”, its reconstitution, (plan, view in perspective, sections), and certain significant details of the edifice in large scale drawings. The portfolio was also accompanied by an appendix that clarified its contents. Distinct, tendencies worth mentioning in the drawings of these young architects are: the care for a strict methodology, the excessive attention paid to “actual state” drawing and the research for “rational spaces”.