Rainscreen is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misapplied terms in use among design professionals and building product manufacturers today. This has led to a wide range of inexact theories about what a rainscreen is, how it performs, what it looks like, and under what circumstances it is used. Disregarding a decades-long accumulation of evidence and knowledge, an emerging trend is developing in which people believe it is perfectly acceptable to generously perforate a building’s exterior cladding without concern about the inevitable consequence of water penetration in doing so. By simply labeling these claddings as rainscreens, many are satisfied that everything is hunky dory.
Rainscreen means different things to different people. To many design professionals, it is synonymous with a state-of-the-art cladding system that does all things well under any circumstance, and looks cool. To product manufacturers, the term is used as a marketing strategy to increase sales—the mere mention of the term in product literature provides a sense of security designers are looking for when considering a rainscreen. To building envelope consultants, the term is closely linked with job security, as in, “you can pay me now to help design this correctly, or you can pay me later when leaks develop.”