Since the moment of its construction, the Dipartimento di Processi e Metodi della Produzione Edilizia has placed a particular emphasis on the systems and techniques of "visual communication" recognizing their potential as supportive instruments for the analysis, elaboration and development of the project of architecture. These intentions found their first expression in the important contribution offered by the presence and production of Professor Giovanni Klaus Koenig, an active supporter of initiatives even outside of the department. His works have created, successively, a dimension always more extensive thanks to enthusiasm and an enterprising spirit which Egidio Mucci, as chair of Strumenti e Techniche della Communicazione Visiva and due to his broad studies of "semiotics," has solicited the institution of an Audiovisual Laboratory in the department, which today makes available a precious and copious collection of cinematographic and audiovisual documents on architecture and design. The recent creation of the Centro Studi Koenig will contribute to themes such as that resented by IMAGE, with research, seminars, publications and debates on the use of new technologies as instruments for architectonic production. Which cultural motivations and which didactic requirements drive a technology department in the faculty of Architecture to concern themselves insistently with the issues connected with cinematography, multimedia and with audiovisuals and information technologies? Technology, by definition, studies the processes of transformation of the built environment. Taking into consideration the process of transforming an environment, one immediately understands the connection that can exist between the cinema, video, architecture and the project. Architecture is the reflex of the project. The project itself is a static entity that does not represent a living expression nor a life, but rather transforms them into architecture. In order to be interpreted, used and rendered as a significant object in our cultural and social expressions, architecture must be associated with a process or temporal moment that continually modifies how it is perceived. Indeed, the true sense of architecture is perceived in the connection between the static fact that is an innate aspect of design and the dynamic fact ingrained in the interpretation and fruition of a design. For this reason, architecture and cinematography have enjoyed in many ways a correlation, a sort of mutual symbiosis. Architecture nourishes itself on the characteristics of cinema and cinema has fed off the expressivity of architecture. It suffices to remember, on an elementary level, the works of Stanley Kubrick and the way in which the scenography expressly recalled the forms, symbols and image of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. Moreover, it suffices to remember Lubitsche, his designs and his productions with the works of Matisse. Cinematography receives symbols and messages from architecture and renders them as spatial-temporal objects and objects of transformation. Similarly, architects receive stimulation and suggestions from cinematography. Several cinematographic works which come from the United States, for example, not only represent the way of life in post-industrial cities, but they analyze it and propose solutions. Due to a spatial-temporal dynamic, cinema can surpass the static concept of the design as well as the restrictions of linearity that tend to generate a reconstruction process in which one perceives only what one reads. Instead, cinema interrupts linearity with reversals or breaks of sequence. Nonlinearity can focus on the more significant and important elements necessary for interpreting reality in its multiformity and for using it as information for the design process. In this sense, the Audiovisual Laboratory of our Department searches to us reality as an instrument in the investigation of phenomena either real or imaginary; in fact, from this mixture of the real and the imaginary the stimulus for invention emerges for the design as well as for the creation. There have been several studies conducted by our researchers which analyze the multiform reality that the lived city can express through the complex and articulate contribution of the director who becomes a mode of carrying out the classic operation of briefing; that is, the collection of a project's most significant data in order to propose alternative solutions. I believe that in these considerations there is a different way of reading the architectural phenomenon and the design phenomenon. Considering some suggestions that philosophers and scholars offer us, the screen rather than the public square became the most significant cross-road of mass-media, (Virilio) and the success of a project's methods can be played off the potential of the screen. In this sense, I believe that we should all observe with a critical eye the dialogue between architecture and cinematographic works. At this moment, we can all envision that these connections are not simply expressions of the culture of an era, which is the era of information, but that they can become the actual instruments of the future. We can imagine that in the actual reality of formative processes twenty percent of the communicative efficacy is owed to the use of words, and eighty percent to the use of visual information. Direct verbal communication tends always to be surpassed by the image of movement. Romano Del Nord PMPE Department Director Introductions Cosimo Carlo Buccolieri Marco Brizzi