Per una visione leggera della tecnologia/For a light vision of technology

Lightness in architecture reveals itself through an organic relationship between energy and matter, optimized in purpose and function. If lightness can attributed to a matter of specific weight, from a conceptual point of view it can be attributed to the design thought, the workings and the conformations of materials, their features and admissible forms. The architectural character of a building can be heavy with lightweight materials, but also light with heavy materials. This relativistic position accompanies lightness poetic and research implemented with technological innovation. Tensile membrane structures show the theme of lightness in architecture in an emblematic and innovative way. Recent research developments are focused on the possibilities given by both double curvature structures and less complex flat solutions. The research records the results of a sort of pervasiveness technological innovation that affects the hybridization between technologies, materials and devices. With the system of thinking and values of modernism - less is more, the reduction to the essence, the deconstruction between load-bearing parts and borne parts of the buildings, the planimetric flexibility - the building lightness has disarticulated the structural, morphological and constructive conventions, through innovative impacts on project research. With light structures lots of experimental architects measured themselves – by Fuller to Prouvé, by Frei Otto to Renzo Piano – and had the awareness of working in a vicious circle through intuition, patient research and innovation that lead to the experimental project. The experimental activity was thus placed at the center of technique and technological innovation, as intellectual resources for the project.