We are so routinized in our day-to-day vision that we often overlook the essentials. Learning to design also means learning to recognize what is architecturally relevant. The search is the effort to find something specific. Thus, the search as a task in teaching is a trick to discover the important things in architecture. Searching is used as a method of teaching in different variations at the KOEN Institute such as creating mappings, collecting patterns and in various exercises and excursions. The different search tasks help students to learn to recognize the architectural important in the built environment and in their own projects and to train this skill.