‘A knowledge of the ethical and aesthetic quality of the creative level achieved by our modern society in the field of architecture, design and mores is important for the Italian industrial world as a whole, constantly engaged in communicating to internal and external markets the quality standards and research levels achieved. Our age is the first to experience the superimposition of different cultures and ages as if these were all one. In the past, the dominant culture was always the current one and compromise and symbioses hardly ever occurred. The Rimini Meeting would like to invite visitors to attain greater cultural awareness and responsibility and try to live our age in accordance with the values this expresses. To base our lives, as often happens, on past values, without attempting to privilege the ethical and aesthetic values of today, means opting not to leave any direct trace in history. A correct knowledge of how to construct daily reality and how this shows itself, of how science, art and technology evolve, enables our society to ask freer and more pertinent questions. It is important to affirm the values which industry and the world of planning realize and express in such an original manner, without imitation and without retreading aesthetic and cultural paths already worn down for centuries. These new values must of course continue to ensure the preservation of the past with the same commitment made in favour of books already written, still to be read and re-read but never re-written. To achieve this unique contact with the Meeting public, Icons, Traces & Networks presents this emblematic space inhabited by thousands of images selected from the ARCA and OTTOGONO archives. Its intention is to enable visitors to read, in a unique spatial situation, a series of images, all distinguished by the same choice of quality, creativeness and temporal correspondence, to generate possibly new interests and new curiosities. As in a display case, visitors will be able to see which tools architects use today. A real section of an architect’s office with two work stations where a designer and his assistant will be working in real time on a real project. Every day at 5 pm, a speaker will hold a brief conference-debate on different topics relating to the general theme of modernity.’