L'ingegneria nel rapporto tra materiali innovativi e beni culturali

Cultural heritage preservation asks new materials performance increasing to pursue in an even more stringent targets of conservation and enjoyment of our country enormous built heritage. In common logic, to the new is the difficult task of proposing solutions intervention of maximum respect for the cultural object. It expects something miraculous that does not correspond to a vision of science. In contrast, there is an awareness that none of the new materials, even intelligent ones, can fully guarantee the conservation, everyone can contribute to ensure its enjoyment. They will outline new approaches and different measurable in terms of interaction and impact, both substantial and perceptive, projecting the cultural object in today. There is no innovative material able to fully guarantee the conservation, nor the reversibility of the conservatively act. But beyond the theoretical concept the goal of conservation and reversibility, includes the transformation in their real operating, perceptible or not, but effective and concrete. And when the action takes place on a much smaller scale of the visible, the modification may be perceptible or not. In this scenario the real innovation, the more advanced one, uses perceptually hidden dimension, with consequent higher potential of new functions and awarding of exceptional performance of matter, in the face of modifications micrometric and nanometric, which regenerate conservation concept. The so-called "science of the small" also manages to regenerate old materials and to increase effectiveness, as well as ferrying new materials and technologies, discoveries for several decades, in the reality of the construction. Engineering has entered the materials design in order to change physical and chemical structure of materials. It also adds an active behavior, which lies in the ability of new materials to change their status to varying external stimuli of the environment and of man will. Even the modification is "hidden" and influences the traditional principles of conservation, beyond the sphere of the visible. Therefore the approach quality to the cultural object requires a revision/regeneration of parameters which relies on conservation’s measurement: reversibility, compatibility and appropriateness. Their theoretical value irrefutable has methodological value, while the action of intervention loses or gains another degree of freedom.