What began as a question about how walls perform under fire, sound and real-world construction pressures became a much deeper journey into resilience, innovation and reinvention. In this personal reflection, Tony Baccarini of Innovate SA and the creator of Click Wall explores the challenges of developing a new wall architecture, the lessons learned from failure and testing, and how understanding the behaviour of walls ultimately mirrored the challenge of managing pressure in life itself.
Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time thinking about walls. Not just how they look when finished, but how they behave under pressure, heat, sound and real-world installation conditions.
Most of that thinking came from day-to-day life at Innovate at SA. Every day we deal with practical construction problems:
- Labour shortages
- Poor coordination
- Awkward details
- Inconsistent installation
- Site waste
- Programme pressure; and
- Systems that often rely too heavily on perfect workmanship on site.
That frustration is what eventually led me towards developing Click Wall. The original idea was quite simple. Could we rethink the wall itself?
Not just add more board, more studs or more insulation, but fundamentally rethink the architecture of the system. The journey has not been easy.
Innovation sounds exciting from the outside, but in reality it is often built while carrying a huge amount of pressure in the background. Trying to innovate while dealing with business uncertainty, cashflow pressure, industry resistance, testing stress and ongoing outside issues can become mentally exhausting.
When I was a contractor, I genuinely believed I was bulletproof. Pressure, stress, deadlines, risk, conflict and constant problem solving were just part of the environment. In many ways, stress itself became the coping mechanism. You keep moving, keep solving, keep firefighting and you convince yourself that stopping is weakness.
Then one day, what I thought I saw in my mind was not really there anymore. That was the beginning of the spiral. Looking back now, I think years of pressure, delayed grief after losing my son Luca, business stress and trying to carry everything without stopping eventually caught up with me all at once. There was a point where I had to step away completely and go to a clinic in South Africa to get grounded again. That experience changed my perspective massively. The world there felt much more raw and brutal than the UK, and in a strange way that honesty helped reset me.
It forced me to realise that strength is not pretending pressure does not exist. Real strength is recognising when it is consuming you and learning how to carry it properly before it breaks you. At times, I realised the only way to keep moving forward was to mentally compartmentalise the stress from the actual innovation work itself.
The innovation had to stay separate from the noise. If I allowed every outside pressure to sit inside the same mental space as the development work, the journey would have stopped a long time ago.
So in many ways, while Click Wall was teaching me about compartmentation and pathway control inside the wall itself, I was also learning how to compartmentalise pressure personally just to keep the journey alive. I also believe there is a genuine need in the world for a new wall architecture.
Construction is changing.
The industry is under pressure from:
- Skills shortages
- Compliance demands
- Productivity challenges
- Programme pressure
- Labour inconsistency
- Modern methods of construction; and
- The growing need for offsite manufacture.
Yet most lightweight wall systems still fundamentally rely on the same stud-based ecology that has existed for decades. In many ways, that system still exists because the industry has rarely stopped to ask, “Can there be another way?”
Click Wall came from asking exactly that question. Not, “How do we slightly improve the existing wall?” But, “What happens if the wall itself becomes a modular architecture rather than a collection of site-built components?”
That shift changes everything:
- Manufacturing
- Assembly
- Behaviour
- Installation
- Compartmentation
- Acoustic control; and
- ultimately how the wall responds under stress.
I genuinely believe the future of construction will move increasingly towards:
- Modularity
- Offsite precision
- Repeatable quality
- Controlled interfaces; and
- behavioural engineering rather than purely material stacking.
That is the lane Click Wall is trying to explore.
The first furnace test was a huge learning curve.
The wall achieved:
- 82 minutes insulation
- 97 minutes integrity
Most people would probably look at that and focus on the failure. What interested me was how the fire behaved.
I could see the furnace trying to organise itself into dominant pathways. That sent me back into redesign mode. Instead of simply adding more material, I started focusing on:
- pathway interruption
- stack restraint
- pressure management
- modular interface behaviour
- cavity disruption
- and how heat and gases actually organise themselves through a wall system.
The second-generation system then went back into the furnace.
This time the wall achieved 130 minutes integrity and insulation
The acoustic testing also achieved:
- Rw 57 dB
- Rw + Ctr 53 dB
But again, the numbers were only part of the story.
What mattered most to me was the behavioural difference between the first and second tests.
The wall stayed calm for much longer.
The fire struggled to dominate the field early.
The architecture kept interrupting the pathways.
That was the moment I realised Click Wall was no longer just an idea. The geometry itself was influencing the behaviour.
At that point, I stopped thinking about Click Wall as simply a wall system. I started seeing it as a new wall architecture.
Traditional lightweight walls are usually designed around:
- studs
- layers
- insulation
- mass
- and standardised assembly logic.
What we are now exploring with Click Wall is different.
The architecture itself is becoming part of the performance.
The geometry, pathways, interfaces, cavities and restraint zones are all influencing how heat, pressure, sound and movement organise themselves through the system.
That is what has made this journey so interesting.
We are no longer simply asking: “How strong is the wall?” We are asking: “How does the wall behave?”
One of the biggest lessons from the furnace testing was that the wall did not fail globally first. Instead, the fire kept trying to organise itself into dominant lanes and crossover points.
That completely changed how I started thinking about the next stage of development.
V3 is now focused on:
- no straight routes
- no continuous trenches
- no easy crossover points
- no clean vertical highways
- no uncontrolled pressure release
- and no single pathway being allowed to become boss of the field.
The goal is not to stop all heat movement.
The goal is to force heat and pressure to:
- turn
- slow down
- split
- lose energy
- re-form
- and fight the architecture repeatedly before they can dominate the system.
That is where the current development work is now focused.
The journey is still early.
There is still, testing, refinement, certification, manufacturing and commercialisation ahead of us. But for the first time, I genuinely feel like the wall is starting to answer back.
The furnace does not care about opinions. It only responds to behaviour. And the latest results suggest we are finally starting to understand how to influence that behaviour in a meaningful way.
