Q1. What was your journey into the façade industry, and what sparked your interest
My father ran exhibitions, garment industry first and then glass processing & fenestration, so I grew up around this industry. While I was still at school, the façade contractors and glass fabricators were his friends. I called them uncle, visited their factories, saw their problems. I came at façades from the people who build them, then the people who engineer them, and only then the people who design them. The opposite order to most.
Honestly, I was lucky to have that base. I never had to learn this industry from the outside, because I already knew the people who build it. My first seven or eight years were mostly listening and learning, and that grounding is what let me understand the business quickly and curate content that was genuinely useful to the people in the room, rather than guessing at what they needed.
Q2. How the industry has evolved since the first Zak event
When we started in 2012, the façade was treated as the part of the building you looked at. The conversation was about appearance, and about whether it would leak.
The biggest change since is that the façade engineer became visible. Back then you would never see a façade engineer or consultant named on a project while the structural engineer always was. That has genuinely shifted. Architecture practices now hire façade specialists in-house, which almost nobody did.
The second is what fills a programme. Embodied carbon is now the most common technical subject on our stages, which would have been unimaginable in 2012. And far more of the work is on buildings that already exist rather than new ones.
What has not improved in thirteen years is the contracting side.
Q3. What are the differences in how regions approach façade design and engineering?
Yes, and the clearest difference is who actually holds the engineering.
The glass curtain wall came out of the American architects. They call it enclosure design, and they were designing the façade rather than engineering it, with large façade contractors carrying the engineering in a design-assist model. A lot of North American work is still delivered that way, and it is not how most of the rest of the world does it.
In newer markets the fundamentals are not settled at all. Stick versus unitised is still an open question, not a matter of taste but a real decision about labour, factory capacity and how you get material onto a site.
And the same façade has to be proven in different ways. A façade that satisfies one continent’s fire test has to be demonstrated all over again for the next one, which shapes what gets specified long before anyone draws it.
Q4. What are the biggest technical and commercial challenges
Commercially, there is a shortage of good façade subcontractors and fabricators, and nobody talks about it enough. Count the ones active twenty years ago against the ones active now and the number has not increased. It is the same or fewer. Curtain-wall producers thirty, forty, fifty years old are going into administration at a record pace, just as façades get more complex.
They are suffocated: cash flow, and retention money of five or ten per cent held for a year against whether the façade performs. The owners’ own children don’t want that risk. So who takes these companies forward?
Technically, a façade is tested as an assembly and built as a site. We certify a specimen in a laboratory, then it is installed a thousand times under time pressure. Most durability failures live in that gap.
Q5. What the industry can do better on collaboration and knowledge sharing
Four things, and none of them needs a committee.
Mentor. The best people here already treat knowledge transfer as part of the job, because they don’t want to end up somewhere with no façade engineers and no talent pool. But it is still voluntary, and it should be normal.
Keep what gets said. A talk reaches the room on the day, and the speaker has usually done real work to prepare it. If it is never recorded or written down, that work is gone when the room empties.
Let people speak in their own language, rather than losing good thinking to a second one.
And the hardest: when something goes wrong, publish it. Failures teach far more than successes, and almost nobody will talk about them.
Q6. What are some key skills and attributes for the next generation
Three skills, and then one attribute that matters more than any of them.
Be able to read a test report. Not the summary, but the actual conditions, and what was and was not tested. A great deal goes wrong because somebody took a certificate as a guarantee when it described one specimen on one day.
Think in systems, not components. A façade fails at interfaces: where glass meets frame, frame meets slab, new meets existing. Most engineers are taught components; the good careers belong to the people who learn interfaces.
Be numerate about carbon, and sceptical of the numbers. Interrogating where a figure came from is worth more than quoting it.
The attribute is curiosity about the people who build it. Go to the factory, go up the scaffold, ask the fabricator why. You cannot engineer a façade you have never watched being installed.