Can architecture answer questions that emerge
in media design, and vice versa? Can the dialogue
between these disciplines inspire a truly integrative
approach? Do we need a new design discipline? Can we
design buildings that tell stories, or media that create spaces?
Bruno Felix, director VPRO Digitaal TV, Hilversum, 1998

As television transformed the mode of understanding information, so the digital is in some way modifying the world of architecture. Our relation with physical space remains mediated more by systems which tend to reduce the distance between a project and its realization, and, today, the screen has become the principal place for such mediation: an environment in which to elaborate a project, a window on the world, a threshold of access to sources of information as well as to further architectonic dimensions. In conjunction with the progressive development of systems of communication and visualization, the screen offers existing architecture and future projects the possibility to put into play with great efficacy expressive means and to start a process of broad communication.

Architecture's new interest in video originated under such conditions and continues to find expression in a complex panorama of achievements due, primarily, to extensive accessibility to the technology of dynamic visualization. More and more the screen serves as a valid means of communication for project forms and is developing as a place of application, research and experimentation. Naturally, the relationship between architecture and images in movement has existed for a long time and has progressed based on different technologies, language and expressive forms. A century has passed since the movie screen first offered to the public something more than a spectacle. The screen communicated, as still communicates, ideas, modes of comportment, lifestyles, instructions for the use of innumerable objects and, above all, spaces...

Only with a certain lethargy has architecture learned to absorb the stimuli offered by the dynamic visualization of the physical world and to interpret the transformations in the perception of space and time that cinema and television have produced on the quotidian level. If one analyzes from this point of view the architectonic production of the last century they could probably retrace the signs of such occasional and often modest modifications. Nevertheless, architecture still lacks the means to express such a large diffusion as well as the means to measure the public usage that corresponds to those stimuli and visions. Although video has served architecture for a long time as an important mode of documentation and analysis for the constructed space as well as for the city, it has rarely been exploited as an instrument for the direct communication of projects. Today the architect can seemingly enjoy the role of "director" of elaborating and communicating projects through the same cinematic mean and with the same language capacities in order to describe and to visualize to the public the physical reality. The screen has habituated us to simultaneously absorb portions of reality with elements of fiction and simulation. Such simulation is the quintessence of design activity. Thus, in addition to testifying to spatial quality, video, when employed in the process of design, can become a formidable means in the production of new architectural interpretations, in order to develop and diffuse new images and new architectures.

The Festival image|architettura in movimento insists on the necessity of demonstrating and comparing the diverse projects that testify to the evolution of systems of communications for architecture. For this reason we have chosen to include in the program not only movie and television productions, but also works produced by architects and students. The program this year is enriched by providing an occasion to meet and reflect on the experimental and didactic forms offered by digital systems, by a section dedicated to video for Italian cities as well as by an interactive exposition on architecture in digital media.
Diverse materials, apparently heterogeneous languages, contrasting points of view. These elements always accompany moments of significant development and innovation. This festival will attempt to measure the charming space the screen can reserve for architecture at this moment of technological change.

Marco Brizzi