Andreas Reinhardt made the case for the part of a ventilated rainscreen façade nobody sees, the sub-structure, and for treating it as a modular kit that lets each project find its own optimal combination of profiles and brackets.
Systea develops, produces and sells sub-structure systems for suspended, back-ventilated rainscreen façades. Founded in 1974 in Norderstedt, near Hamburg, it is now part of the Simpson Strong-Tie Group, the American structural-connectors company, founded in 1956, with around five thousand employees and a turnover in the billions, exporting to more than fifty countries.
The core idea Reinhardt put forward is a Baukastensystem, a modular kit of parts. Rather than a fixed product, the customer configures the optimal combination of profile system and wall bracket for a given building, assembling the sub-construction to suit the cladding and the conditions.
That framing did the work of the talk: what to consider when planning a ventilated façade, how the sub-construction changes for different cladding types, heavy stone against lightweight panels, and where quality and testing sit in a system that, once the cladding is on, disappears from view but carries the whole façade.
