TRENDS: Woods

This is nothing new in the last hour: wood in its various essences has returned to the leading role, while plastic, the queen of the 80s and 90s, is struggling to face its reconversion.

Even before nature, due to a pandemic, took back its spaces even in the city and returned to flourish, designers and entrepreneurs began to favor wood for their artifacts.

Among the paladins of wooden architecture Michele De Lucchi, to whom we owe the Unicredit Pavillion in Milan, in Piazza Gae Aulenti and who, in the spartan laboratory in the garden of his home, on the Angera lake, creates natural wooden houses with the chainsaw and Matteo Thun, designer of the Hotel Vigilio Mountain Resort in San Vigilio and Milan of a luxury condominium in Via Tortona.

Matteo says he learned his love for materials when he was still a student at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence. He knows that they must not be betrayed: “the wood” he explains, “must not be chemically treated and must not be planed. If it is left to age naturally it petrifies, as taught by the Walser, a population of Germanic origin, living in Valsesia, and can last for hundreds of years. “The sensations,” he declares, “are transmitted to the skin and pass through the open pores. For this reason the materials must be allowed to breathe, without paints, without finishes that erase the imperfections pertinent to their nature, that is to their beauty ".

The Margheritelli group, founded in 1870, which has linked its history to wood, producer, among other things, of the Listone Giordano flooring, has among its priorities the conservation of forests and replanting, instead of trees cut for their own needs of wood, as many new plants.

Finally, the Arte Sella foundation in Val di Sella in Borgo Val Sugana hosts art installations by international creatives who have chosen wood as the material for their works, including the Italians Giuseppe Penone and Giuliano Mauri, authors of poetic open-air installations.