Curtain wall cladded with clay tiles (010)

Mecanotubo is one of the façade industries that invested heavily in the late 1990s in Catalonia to provide a unitary response to the rainscreen façade.

They opted to adapt stick curtain wall technology to this two-layer façade. As in the Carburos Metalicos façade, the resulting inner sheet provides enough water tightness to consider a drainage cavity, and consequently an outer layer, unnecessary. Here the outer layer acts only as a covering.

This very well-aimed attempt has a cost problem: it is too expensive if we compare it to the usual inner wall made of brick. This problem is aggravated as the mullions need to be arranged very closely due to the width of the sandwich panel. In this first attempt, trying to save on profiles by removing some transoms generated mechanical problems that were rectified in later projects such as the AB Skipper Hotel in Barcelona and later the Hotel Pullman.