Stone architecture and technological innovation: the last 100 years

Everyone thinks that the construction in stone is ex-pression of technical tradition and - therefore – in-trinsically suggests a callback to the past. In fact, the extended patrimony of architectures in stone of all the ages, strengthens the idea that the noble ma-terial expresses for antonomasia the triumph of the tradition; a valence, this, that induces to use it sometimes to celebrate important people or places, sometimes to provide a haven against the hazard-ous storms of Modernity. The behaviours are often the same and don’t go far away from the idea of covering thin structural cages with reassuring stone facades. Who wants to inno-vate, seems to have no choice: to resort to other materials. If you don’t know how to resolve this problem, the industry supplies you another chance: the artificial stone, that’s a sad shadow of the noble model, of which emulates the shapes and often im-proves the performances, never reaching the magi-cal charisma. Only a careful and - above all - disenchanted read-ing of the stone architectural production can uproot similar believes. Through that, it’s possible to see as in all the ages the construction in stone is, first of all, a challenge to the nature, to the gravity and to the technique; it’s an unending battle, almost always won only through the innovation. There is no work in stone that does not contain one small or great tech-nological enterprise; vice versa, few constructive in-novations have been able to avoid, sooner or later, the challenge against the Material “for excellence”. The present contribution wants to show - with sev-eral examples - only the last chapter of this long story. One hundred years of architecture in stone - reassumed in key-works, more or less important - that show a continuous innovation, pursued through the constant aim to re-create a language of always equal words; words used in different ways, in order to describe together nature and rationality, memory and sustainability, matter and geometry. The stone, at the end, will emerge for what it is. Nei-ther present nor traditional, but after all only a mate-rial, precious and at the same time common, fasci-nating and exacting; a heavy material, than the ar-chitect - as the sculptor - can reveal or hide, subli-mating his hard work in a “material immateriality”.