The use of high thickness stone materials in external claddings represents a traditional and widely experimented building method. In the last years the principles of sustainability, at least in the field of the technological research, underlined the possibility to use thin slabs dry mounted on metal substructures and reinforced with epoxy resins or lightweight honeycomb and alucobond panels. The stone market, now in time of crisis, doesn’t seem to consider these new solutions in the suitable way and the high thickness application’s techniques are, then, the ones taken in reference in short and middle terms and it is highly necessary to evaluate and to discover, with a technologically correct use, their characters of sustainability. These thick slabs, if not straight the blocks, in fact, can be used in almost dry systems as bearing or self-bearing elements (significant on this subject is also the case of the massif reinforced stone), ensuring durability, interesting thermal behaviour and also adding an high expressive strength deeply linked to the common cultural tradition and to the ancient building knowledge, with wide references to the stereotomic and tectonic aspects. The use of massif elements allows to simplify the façade’s system, transforming the claddings in curtain wall too, in favour of the building simplicity and rapidity and of the containing of the energetic costs of the whole process. The stone blocks could be, at the end of the building’s life cycle, simply demounted and reutilized in an another building, in the same shape or cut in slabs of different thickness, extending their period of utilization. This use of marbles and stones is a reinterpretation of the traditional technique and presents itself as complementary and not as alternative to that one, more technological, of the thin slabs and as this has to be carefully studied.
