Abstract:

In the design and architecture fields, during the last decade, many centers of material collections called “material libraries” have been created. These centers are proposed as an instrument of knowledge and dissemination of information about materials, and they have been created for business or educational purposes: they can be distinguished free from fee-paying admission, and they offer as a primary service the access to their own database, be it physical or online. The creation of material libraries, where material samples are collected and physically illustrating different formats, their materiality, and the processes they underwent, is a step towards approaching the designer to materials and technologies. The importance and the reasons of the success of these enterprises consist in the opportunity to look, touch, test, compare, analyse and experience all materials.
This document aims to offer an overview of the various initiatives from many countries around the world, highlighting for example the various differences each class of materials presents, or the different classifying methodologies the selected models and the respective literature offer nowadays.
This paper also aims to assess the possibility of starting an international collaboration to exchange experiences and make way for a broader discussion on a possible unification of the existing rating systems, in order to encourage the exchange of data and information among the different university centers. The university material libraries, where physical samples of materials are collected from different places of origin and catalogued, provide a consultation and advice service as part of the material research during design projects, so that students can develop knowledge of materials useful to their projects. The direct experiencing materials, the possibility to manipulate them is essential to students, so that they can assimilate first and then successfully make use of the acquired notions about the large world of materials. The material library also becomes an ideal place to answer the obvious need for communication among different project cultures, in order to combine the expressive-sensory level with the technical and engineering one.
The issues raised in this paper take into account the necessary procedures for the creation of an international protocol for a partnership among many universities’ material libraries, respecting individual peculiarities and at the same time promoting the possibility of creating a network of international research in this area. With the aim of defining these procedures, the paper reports “Materiali e Design” case study, a material library at the Politecnico di Milano (IT), and its influence in creating M + D, the material library under construction in São Paulo (Brazil), at the Centro Universitário Senac.

Keywords:

materials, material library, university material libraries.