Registration, documentation, or architectural survey? The identification of the theme begins by confronting the semantics that identify it: unlike cultures in which it takes on a precise meaning (as in the forms "rilievo" or "rilevamento", in Italian), the Portuguese language usually uses broad and even ambiguous terms for to identify the subject in object, leaving room for misunderstandings of all sorts.Our research is motivated by the systematic performance of documentation work, within the scope of professional practice, which has aroused methodological questions explored in this dissertation. These questions are at the heart, above all, in recent experiences with Vila Itororó in São Paulo -Brazil (2014, where the complexity of the object transformed that experience into what we could call a "limit case" for documentation. There, some survey practices were put to the test, raising reflections on its potential as (1) cognitive instrumental in relation to the object of studies, and (2) methodological instrumental in relation to the project of intervention in cultural heritage.In the quest to elaborate this reflection, we examine the architectural survey as an object of study: we investigate its historical aspects, as an ancient practice that develops pari passu with European modernity and, thus, settles down in Western culture. We also investigated its contemporary aspects, as a discipline with methodology and epistemology accepted at the international scientific level.Then, the research seeks to contribute to the realignment, in Brazilian thought, of the following questions: the understanding of architectural survey as a practice, as a discipline and as a method; the relationship between the survey and the architectural restoration, as a subsidiary instrument but not scientifically subordinated to the latter.