This piece of work is concerned with how shapes are generated, explored and transformed during the architectural designing process. It postulates that the relations and connections between sketches, produced during the design activity, can be defined in terms of shape transformations and described according to a closed list of shape operators. These latters provide a formal description of the shape exploration process and allow a deep understanding of its logic. To achieve its goal, this study creates a model to describe the different shape transformations, performed by designers, during the sketching activity.