Dal tatton al touch: l'allestimento degli spazi espositivi della materioteca

For centuries architecture has been influenced by the shape of its volumes and the spatiality of its empty: the material of those solid matter was fixed, immutable and heavy, often plastered, sometimes hidden by overlaid decorations. In a relationship of mutual conditioning architectural representations were originally focused on configurations, proportions, perspective views, without any explicit reference to the material, designed according to graphic convention to fill white areas between lines. Contemporary architecture is a complex interplay of shapes and materials, in which both contribute to the expressiveness and representation techniques end up to adapt themselves to communicate these new values. The images are highly realistic and the student ends up by dressing his designed forms with realistic materials, but this hyperrealism often does not correspond to his real knowledge of the represented material, of its physico-chemical characteristics or of these tactile and perceptive qualities that contribute to characterize its peculiar expressiveness in architecture. In reply to this complexity to be taken into consideration in the student's education was born the Materioteca MAED in its dual soul with a physical place of exposure and a virtual space for online consultation of the database. The knowledge of the material has been entrusted primarily to the direct, tactile, olfactory and visual experience, which convey some physical characteristics such as weight, texture, color or transparency. The setting of the MAED exhibition in the historic Palazzo Latilla, University Federico II of Naples, is based on an integrated approach to materials, aimed at the complementarity between physical and perceptive knowledge of materials for architectural and design objects.