Place, materials and proportions: from a sensory architecture to an essential one

The creativity of the 21st century architectural project has been confronted for more than a decade with the reality that has changed as a result of the economic, cultural and social crisis that has affected the world since 2007. An impoverished reality architecture has to take into account and to which some architects respond by focusing the project on real needs, overcoming the formalistic and technological excesses of the end of the last century. These architects take as their starting point the observation and reinterpretation of what already exists, the reality, the characteristics of the place, its tracks and its memories. From these they deduce the themes and elements to be reinterpreted - reinvented in the project. They seek quality and beauty in the spatial structure, in its atmosphere, in the tactile capacity of their materiality, in the interaction of these with light, in the ability to evoke collective memories and those that emerged from the context with the aim of giving life to places. Places are living spaces that respond to a specific need, designed to arouse reactions and emotions. This design methodology is not innovative, it is used by some contemporary architects who know the spaces and devices used by the great masters of 20th century architecture and reinterpret them by updating them, to seek in this time of crisis and limited means an essential beauty, made of simple things. Place, memory, matter, light and proportions are five terms that express the essence of architecture from its origins to the present day. They are closely interrelated with each other. The place is simultaneously a natural and artificial landscape, geography and history, it preserves the traces of the past and is the scenario of the present; its material and immaterial characters - materials, light, sounds, smells - define an atmosphere that identifies that place and changes over time. Memory is both history, that concern the tracks and spatial structures of an architecture and a city, and the culture and traditions of a place, the collective and individual memories and their evocative capacity. All this gives shape to places where man has an experience from which he receives sensations. By reading the works of Jørn Utzon, Luis Barragán, Peter Zumthor, Alberto Campo Baeza, Elisa Valero and Toni Gironès i want to highlight how these five terms continue to be the foundations that give meaning to an essential and sensorial architecture.