Roberto Sprocati argued that a stoneware ventilated façade only works when it is treated as a fully engineered system, tailor-made and turnkey, rather than a catalogue product.
Emilgroup is an Italian company that has been making porcelain stoneware ceramic solutions since 1961, a fast-moving, innovation-led manufacturer with a large production capacity, and Sprocati presented alongside M2QUARE, its partner on the ground in Cyprus.
He structured the talk as a set of questions: why use a ventilated façade at all, why clad it in stoneware, and the one that matters most, is this a product or a system? His answer was unambiguous. A ventilated façade is a system, and stoneware is only as good as the way it is engineered, fixed and detailed.
That is where the tailor-made and turnkey argument came in. Managing a ventilated façade well, he argued, means taking responsibility for every component and every stage, from design through to installation, rather than supplying tiles and leaving the rest to chance.
The upside is what stoneware then makes possible on the outside: durable porcelain surfaces that run from natural stone to timber effects, giving the façade its performance and its identity at once.