ABOUT MATERIALS

摘要

In order to be intelligent and responsible these days, design products and architecture must respect materials and pay a great deal of attention to production costs. These are the basic conditions for developing a sustainable industrial project. Advanced industrial culture has always worked according to these guidelines, long before the label "green " started to crop up all over the place. By now, it is used as slogan devoid of meaning that mainly answers to mere mediagenic demands. If we dig below the barrage of propaganda, we discover that many so-called green designs, even those communicated with great emphasis, hide the energy and production costs necessary to make a material "ecologically sustainable" as well as the harmful nature of some of their components. Over the last 20 years, research into materials has made extraordinary leaps forward, to such an extent that they almost resemble those that occur in the evolution of a species. All the materials that were commonly used before are now considered obsolete and "bad". To understand the technological evolution that has taken place, we need only to think of MDF, the "super-chipboard", and the enormous extent to which what we use in 2015 differs from its forerunner in terms of composition, binders and strength. As for paints, it used to be impossible to paint surfaces with certain materials, but above all you needed to coat them with a minimum of 140 grams per square metre. Nowadays, the job is done with 50,60 or 70 grams. The question of the percentage of chemical components (today a maximum of 20 per cent) is less important compared to other factors. What truly counts is that the company possesses an integrated model of production complete with a group of, say, research chemists who follow manufacturing developments.