Tempo e Materia dell'architettura

Architecture takes shape in its own materials that make up spaces, languages, visions, textures, patterns and colors . Materials can tell about structural components, functional aspects and expressive values, helping to define perception of architecture. Particularly, the use of stone runs through the history of architecture since its origins : a kind of red thread running through it and linking tradition with innovation, in a succession of positions balancing between the past and future. In reference to his archetypes, architecture has always used what nature has made available and thanks to the use of the stones have been created many structures and constructions where to live . In this context of reflections, the wise use of the material has always been an expression of an ethical attitude and of a moral approach to architectonic issues, where it is the same architecture that reinterprets materials in new figurations, giving them new lives. Indeed, there is a consistency between the materials used and the design of the space: every material has its own nature and his times, has a "voice" and an expressiveness that is reinforced in the design and in a specific use . The materials are structure, shape, and surface of the architecture, but are also time crystallized in its composition: visual time in reading the rythm of its elements, fast and smooth in the scan of the parties, slow and introspective in the soundness of the wall structure . A time that is inherent in the construction and into the interior space that lives: a time quick, dynamic, of fast exchanges, or differently a time that preserves and slowly returns its values, jealous guardian of his empty spaces. Architecture speaks through the materials that come to life with it differently and manifest themselves in time : it is the soft rock of the tuff in the building face view, or protected by colored plaster in the thoughts and additions ; is the strong rock of piperno used in majestic portals and in plans basamentali that symbolically represent the power and strength of the nobility, it is the travertine that returns the essential lines of the fascist architecture, it is the marble with polychrome decorations used in baroque altars . It 'still always stone, in its specificity, the use of which recurs in the history of architecture as an expression of different building traditions . In the different classifications, stone materials are distinguished on the basis of geological and petrographic criteria and on the basis of the physical, chemical and mechanical properties that set them apart. These classifications determine a very rich analytical framework that is particularly useful to specialists, but sometimes is difficult to translate in the real substance and in the perception of the selected materials . Many are in fact aspects that contribute to the identification of specific cases and very often it is the experience and careful observation that allow you to arrive at a correct interpretation, because the different places of extraction, the different processes, different surface treatments or even the various weathering exposure may cause different visual effects, also regarding the same material .