History of wall claddings

Several years ago in Norway, farmers, frustrated with the destruction of harvests through adverse weather conditions of snow and rain penetrating the barns in which their products were stored looked into constructing secondary exterior structures on walls. The assumption was based on the idea that a double layer would prevent water or snow from penetrating the internal wall as the outer wall would slow down pressure even though it would be penetrated.

It was surprising to the farms that the idea was effective as snow and water didn’t penetrate through the double walled barns than they did with those with single walls. The barn walls were constructed with timber allowed for the fee passage of air through the joints. The residues of the penetrated moisture contents were stored between the walls and the passing air dried them off leading to the idea of creating a back ventilated cavity procedure was born.

Residues stored between cavities to the ground level were the main focus here and the idea was centered on implementing the process into multiple means. It is nearly impossible to keep water or moisture from penetrating the outer layer of any structure over time and the Norwegian farmers accepted this and with the ventilated cavity method found a way of dealing with it before the get into the secondary layer.

Over time, this process has been greatly improved upon and that can be seen with wall cladding in which rather than setting up another wall entirely a less tedious means is employed, a selected material is applied upon the wall rather with mechanical means.

Wall cladding method of application serves is greatly beneficial as they are mechanically fixed and not bonded to walls like paints or wall papers, thereby leaving the option for easy replacements whenever necessary.

Wall claddings have been implemented into constructions greatly in Europe as it’s been preferred as opposed to using a single wall design with a secondary back up gutter system due to most single wall structures using a permeable material such as concrete or bricks.

The ventilated cavity technique overtime has lead European architects to design exterior walls with room for its implementation and further more thus has led to this been developed into what we now call the Rain screen principle.

Europe has been using this principle as its primary method of construction for over 40years and thereby leading to manufacturers using various materials as wall clads.

Terracotta is a prominent material due to its naturalistic features. Terracotta cladding makes use of baked clay in creating the perfect aesthetic rain screen. Terracotta cladding due to its naturalistic qualities also gives room for little to no fire outbreak s serving as a major plus against plastic and mostly other materials.

The essence of a true terracotta cladding comprises of:

·          A stud wall construction.

·          Sheathings attached to the back of the studs.

·          Aluminum or other metal sub-constructions serving as cladding supports attached to the back of the studs.

·          A cladding support designed to create a back ventilated cavity between the exterior cladding surface and interior of the cladding material.

·          The exterior cladding attached back to the cladding supports.

LOPO terracotta covers all the above effectively when implementing any terracotta cladding. The advantage of using LOPO Terra-cotta Panels as a rain screen is that LOPO terra-cotta panels are impervious to water penetration, so the only moisture that will penetrate through the outer skin will be that which passes through the open-joints.

LOPO terracotta has a production ability comprising of;

1. The longest domestic roller kiln comprising of 428 firing units;

2. An 80,000 square meters open stockyard with a daily capable reserve of natural clay raw materials amounting to 300,000 tons.

4. An indoor product repository with 150,000 tons of storage capacity.

5. An automatic production line for cutting, shaping and polishing clay material.

6. A storage system capable of reserving 12,000 tons of prepared clay.

7. Class A imported molding machines for extruding vacuum.