Smart Materials and Components: a revolution in the built environment

Building sector has recently undergone a real revolution, becoming fertile ground for experiencing new materials and technologies equipped with high-performance, reduced dimensions and unconventional features, to properly address current needs. Also thanks to the rise of automation, architectural ideas and their physical manifestations have been directed not only to the production of sustainable artifacts, but even towards a new generation of smart buildings, capable of react to the external variability of the boundary conditions and to the ever-changing needs of end-users. In this transition from a “traditional” to a “fully-integrated” smart building, building envelope plays a significant role, primarily due to new possibilities that smart materials and technologies opened in this field. However, it has to be said that in the meaning of “smart” could stand smart materials and technologies but also components made of apparently traditional materials, able to provide in an unconventional way a smart and adaptive behavior; so, even components designed and realized to acquire new features, thanks to the integration of single materials or heterogeneous components, can be considered smart as well. Hence, the paper, after investigating the concept of smart in architecture, will discuss smart materials for architecture, including manners and quality of their operation. Complementary goal of this contribute is to show how the relationship between advanced materials, technologies and architecture could become a key driver for innovative building design concepts, thus resulting in the expression of a new global language, able to co-habits with tradition while generating new formal paradigms, determined by the establishment of the above mentioned innovations in current building practices.