In 1986 and the years that followed a group of architects initiated and conducted a research movement in which they called on a psychiatrist for stimulus in their efforts to find uncommon and unusual images while elaborating their identity as constructors of new things. This proposition was paralleled by an inquiry into the possibility of a relationship between the unconscious and language, the first theme obviously pertaining to the psychiatrist, the second to linguists.

That the architects found themselves in the middle, between these two identities, should perhaps be read not as a fortuitous insertion but rather as an element which promoted, if not the two inquiries, then the relationship between them. The search for images - and not just images of the figurative arts but in particular those of the arts of construction, where the intervention which modifies external reality characteristic of the architect's work is involved - made it possible to approach unconscious reality to conscious language and to discover the link between the two.

The working hypothesis is that the use of language to modify human reality peculiar to the work of the psychiatrist and psycotherapy is specifically related to that perhaps particularly unconscious element which is the active intervention modifying external reality.

It thus happens that we are obliged to undertake research into a kind of language - language that modifies human reality - which has precise links with or unavoidable derivations from images; otherwise the modifying language would be the one which operates by excluding or eliminating images rather than by transforming them.

It also happens that, in developing this research, we are obliged to consider and direct attention not only to conscious images and well-defined figures, but also to those represented in the architect's project, which we have to define as unconscious.

It follows that the unconscious intervenes in reality, and this is a completely new and original thought: in fact, conscious human thought has never acknowledged the fact that the unconscious can intervene in and even determine that activity which leads first to survival, through the construction of a dwelling place, and then to life itself, since the art of constructing is not limited to mechanical and rational utility but includes the dimensions of beauty and pleasure as well.

These considerations lead to the pretension of seeking an architect's identity which goes beyond acquiring a technique aimed at attaining his fellows' well-being, and adds to that a proposition of transforming existing reality which constitutes itself as an element of frustrating inertia and stimulating fuller human realization.

The architect's development thus leads him into the field of human sciences to deal with, to study and to create things, and not only technical instruments for the good management of the vegetative life of human beings.

Creating a dwelling involves something that unsettles everyday life and inertia. This "courage of images", as we called it, is transformed - in the act of making - into language of the images proposed in the things which have been made, when the architect's work not only responds to the satisfaction of needs - or even of the requirements expressed in the request - but proposes something which stimulates or actually obliges the request to modify itself; a modification which becomes possible when the architect's response embodies that dose of love for others which would never countenance the passive receptivity of a technician submissive to the commands of another human being.