Intuizioni, invenzioni e innovazioni nelle Favole periodiche di Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Insight, invention and innovation in Hugh Aldersey-Williams’s Periodic Tales. In scientific literature about specific technological fields, it is difficult to envisage the possibilities for practical implementation of innovations and the functional everyday repercussions in the construction and use of architectural spaces. Gaining an insight of this kind is especially challenging when it comes to studies of chemical properties and the transformation processes of materials. Despite the fact that study of materials is indisputably a central, crucial part of architectural training, the level of investigation into the finest elements of materials almost always remains abstract and detached from the conception and construction of living spaces. An unanticipated contribution in this respect has been made by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Architectural matters were always bound to play a part in his series of tales about the chemical elements and how they are used. The stories are based on the periodic table and they recount the insights, inventions and experiments in the adventurous exploits of individual visionaries and groups, both in the solitude of the laboratory and in the realm of industrial and market competition. Although architecture is not at the heart of the accounts and it does not form the backdrop as the narrative unfolds, it encapsulates the extent to which technological and scientific spirit has contributed to the construction of everyday living spaces over the course of history.