This paper arises from a pedagogical experience based on the development of a methodology that used tropology as a tool for research (White in the field of construction of research problems in architecture. The experience was carried out in the context of the course History and Critique VI of the grade in Architecture of the National University of La Matanza, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The methodology used consisted of developing an apparatus that generates research problems from the recognition of a topos -a topic or epistemic commonplace belonging to the disciplinary field of the career- and its relationship with a tropos -a figure belonging to a field other than architecture-. On the one hand, the topos was chosen by each one of the students according to their socio-cultural problems and according to their concrete experiential situations in the framework of architecture and urbanism. On the other hand, the tropos arose from a figurative displacement exercise that allowed us to take into account the predicative rather than denominative potentialities of the tropos. From the semantic cross between the topos and the tropos, the students constituted their syntagma that also served as the future title and motto of the research project. This syntagma had the characteristic of being a hybrid, a space of significance generated by the displacement of the topic towards the creation of the new place, of fictional nature, which had to be narrated and described according to its own logic and which functioned as an inhabited threshold between the topic and the u-topic, a place that is installed beyond the topic. Fiction thus became the necessary continuation of this first rhetorical movement, the displacement generated by the figurative potentiality of meaning became a field of investigation from the construction of fictional space, a space of the possible. This space is tense rather than substitutive since the interweaving of a topos with a tropos regarding a research problem reveals a certain kinship with predicative operations, operations based not so much on the terms of similarity, of a "being as", but on those of a "being". This predicative operation is pragmatic, the performance of concrete and incisive research experience, since the direct attribution of the tropos to the topos creates a surprise: it resembles an enigma, the figuration claims more a theory of tension than a theory of substitution (Genette 1970: 75). Once the syntagma is obtained, writing and graphic languages have served as support for the arguments of the research problem. Thanks to an analysis of the tense dimensions between the chosen research problem and the figures -dimensions such as scale, order, and distance of analysis, among others- the students were able to have a concrete experience of research that included both projectual and epistemic problems.