Everyone loves a good slatted design, whether in the form of a brise soleil, sunscreen, ceiling plane, or even furniture. While wood is the obvious choice for such applications, the material might not lend itself well to some designs due to factors of weight, installation, and performance or maintenance mandates. Here are five alternatives to wood to consider when creating your next slatted masterpiece.
Barz system by Ceilings Plus.
Ceilings Plus: Barz
Barz™ is an entire panel system that you predesign with slats, struts, strips, beams, boards, and other linear components. Because everything is made of light-gage aluminum, they’re light enough to make installation easier. Panel widths range from one to three feet, while lengths are four to 10 feet. And a variety of color and wood finishes are offered.
Fiber-cement panels from Equitone were installed as a sunscreen on this office building in Belgium.
Equitone
The company’s fiber-cement panels are well-suited to rainscreen applications. But the project team of deJong Gortemaker Algra and THV Ar-Te fashioned them into a sunscreen, pitching them at 30-degree angles on an office building in Leuven, Belgium (shown). Equitone can be specified in sizes of up to four by 10 feet and can be cut into custom shapes, perforated, printed, or sanded.
The New York Times headquarters features a screen constructed with Shildan’s Alphatube ceramic tubes. Photo by Frieder Blickle.
Shildan: Alphatube
In the heart of Midtown Manhattan, the New York Times’ headquarters building is an iconic work by Renzo Piano Workshop, and part of its allure is the newspaper’s branding signage emblazoned onto an exterior screen constructed from Shildan’s Alphatube. The product is a glazed, extruded ceramic tube through which metal rods can be run to attach to a mounting system. A variety of shapes, sizes, and colors are offered.
Fortina by B+N Industries can be used in both exteriors and interiors.
B+N Industries: Fortina
Suitable for both interior and exterior settings, Fortina appears as standard wood slats, but they’re lightweight aluminum units with hyperrealistic non-PVC surfaces finished with a wood appearance. They can be used to create screens, ceilings, handrails, furniture, and other architectural and interior design elements.
The Granoff Center, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, boasts a rainscreen composed of VMZINC’s composite panels.
VMZINC: Composite Wall Panels
Diller Scofidio + Renfro pushed the envelope on the Granoff Center for Creative Arts at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Here, a rainscreen is composed of zinc-composite panels that are flat at one end but eventually are manipulated into folded forms resembling pleats turned on their side. The pleated corners are angled upward at three points to frame glazed openings. Specifiable in large formats, these panels are also ideal for ventilated cladding.
