Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to present a functional view of the fundamentals of the computer graphics process based on the classic polygonal model. There are several advantages for adopting such an approach. Firstly, the functional view is a natural abstraction of the problem. Secondly, many well known computer graphics optimization techniques can be directly obtained from the original specification by applying general and well understood transformational programming algebraic laws on functional expressions. Thirdly, a number of highly parallel implementations suited for various parallel architectures can be derived from the initial specification by a systematic application of general transformation strategies for parallelizing functional programs.