MATERIALS, ARCHITECTURE AND MULTISENSORIALITY. Sensitive spaces for care and health

Introduction The expressive values of light, and colors, interpenetrate in materials, becoming intensely structuring factors and since ever used in design processes contextually to formal choices to characterize the surfaces and spaces of architecture from a sensorial point of view and orient the perceptive experience. Where the contemporary culture seems to subtend a veil of elusiveness to the real data, connoting itself through a widespread tendency to dematerialization, in architecture this uncoupling from the corporeal, expressing itself by the study of infinitesimal thicknesses and the search for mutable and ambiguous material consistenciesto the usual perception, generates, in countertendency, a need for physicality that refound the value of architecture starting from the materials. The widespread instability of the material substance is reversed in an increasing interest in materials, aimed at enhancing their sensorial qualities within an enlarged perceptive dimension which, confirming the more usual and consolidated meanings of materials¹, reinvents further, innovative and unexpeted². Once an objective idea of the perceived has become unreachable and the continuity of the traditional system of balances between material perception and its significance has been interrupted, this interest in the language of materials is certainly understandable, “[…] as if there were no longer stable forms on which to settle the memory and on which to increase the thickness of the experience. […]