With the new planning software Digital Drylayout – DDL.20, architects, designers, stonemasons, and dealers can plan natural stone projects, select materials, generate reports and cutting data for production, and place orders. The tool is free for architects and designers. Civil engineer Jan Keller, through his company Art Emotional, developed it in collaboration with Lasa Marmo as a partner in the stone industry. It is intended to be made available to other industry players in the future. Especially during the pandemic, it can be seen as a beacon of hope for decentralized projects in the natural stone sector.

As user-friendly as a B2C online store

The picturesque South Tyrol, where Laas marble is quarried, is hard to beat in terms of idyllic beauty: The Weißwasser quarry lies at 1,567 meters above sea level in the heart of the national park; down in the valley, countless apple orchards cluster around the little village of Laas, and beyond that: lots of greenery, lots of silence. A wonderful place to live. For selling natural stone: not quite so much. After all, the marble is sold all over the world, and even without a pandemic, Laas is remote from these markets and international target audiences.

In the age of COVID-19, when customers often cannot inspect raw slabs in person (and even afterward, when society will likely have grown accustomed to traveling less), a digital solution is all the more necessary. For years now, Lasa Marmo has therefore been leveraging digital capabilities; it integrated a special scanner into its production process early on to precisely scan raw slabs and was one of the first in the industry to develop a database. Now comes its successor—initially in English—a “Stone Gallery” designed to be particularly transparent and user-friendly.

It currently includes 3,000 slabs (primarily from the LASA !ndividual line so far), representing about 30 percent of the potential inventory, and is set to be continuously expanded. In addition, there are 2,000 slabs that Lasa Marmo uses to organize current projects. Digitally rendering the light-reflecting white marble—including its veining—with color calibration was a particular challenge. The stated goal: to reproduce the color gradient in the material so precisely that it can be digitally viewed in full detail.

Instead of simply featuring a single slab as a “representative” of an entire raw block—from which the customer must infer the rest—the Stone Gallery also displays all the slabs from the block. Product Manager Kurt Ratschiller says: “The raw slabs are all scanned in high resolution, tagged, and archived. We have an interface running in the background with our inventory management system, so the customer can access current stock levels in real time. We’re working on displaying defects in the raw slabs in the database as well.”

This is also intended to increase the net yield of the material and thus make operations more sustainable: After all, unique veining patterns and heterogeneous materials can be combined as desired. Keller explains that, particularly in interior design, projects are popular where, for example, the grain pattern of a wall panel looks as if it were cut from a single block of marble.

Planning such patterns has been very time-consuming—and therefore expensive—up until now. This is due in no small part to the approval process, during which the slabs are laid out according to the final installation plan. For the Stone Gallery, the developers drew inspiration from major B2C players like Amazon and Booking.com when it comes to user-friendliness. This is forward-thinking, as digitalization has become ubiquitous and users demand a convenient customer journey, regardless of whether they’re shopping online for personal use or researching raw slabs for professional purposes. For example, the database offers selection filters such as five price categories with prices per square meter and allows users to compare slabs from a preselected list as well as reserve materials.

New Planning Tool for Architects and Stonemasons

The millimeter-precise scanning of raw slabs enables a major leap forward in digital planning: Lasa Marmo’s database is connected to DDL.20, a software solution for Digital Dry Layout, or digital blending. Jan Keller from the company Art Emotional developed this new tool in collaboration with the team at Lasa over the course of a two-year project. His goal is to provide an intuitive interface between CAD programs and the stone industry: “DDL.20 ensures that communication among all parties involved in a natural stone project is internationally understandable, using clear images, definitive figures, and processing data. This allows us to achieve a new economy in the use of natural stone and more sustainable projects. We want to become an industry pioneer—a kind of Booking.com for natural stone.”

The idea for the program originated during the World Trade Center Transportation Hub project: For this major contract in New York, Lasa Marmo supplied a total of 40,000 square meters of marble from 2012 to 2016. During the more than 130 inspections and acceptance meetings between the U.S. and South Tyrol, the need for a digital tool became apparent. In general, Keller says, most of the planning processes in the industry have so far been cumbersome and time-consuming because natural stone has not been successfully integrated with the possibilities of digitalization.

How the digital planning process works

Keller and his team offer free webinars to introduce users to the DDL.20 platform. And Lasa Marmo provides a planning team that works behind the scenes to offer support, monitor projects, and step in when needed. Basically, the tool works as follows: Architects and construction planners create a project—such as a wall cladding project—and upload their corresponding design in DXF format. In the integrated Stone Gallery, they can select suitable raw slabs, which are then reserved for their project.

In the blending module, they can now customize the planned wall cladding. The selected slabs are positioned with millimeter precision and are scaled and transferred to the project plan via drag-and-drop. There, they can be aligned, moved, and combined based on their grain pattern, for example. A special feature indicates the best possible use of the raw material.

In the background, the tool generates production files from the layouts and, if necessary, issues error messages in case of overlaps or missing production margins. If needed, multiple designs can be created, even by different project participants. The project manager defines their permissions and roles within the tool. Changes made during the planning process are also no problem: The system saves the data in the background, so a complete re-blending isn’t necessarily required when an update is made.

In the next step, the blending variants can be loaded directly into rendering programs. The result is a detailed report containing all key parameters for the entire value chain: cost calculation, quotation preparation, and cutting preparation. For fabricators, the report simplifies production control because a so-called cutting ticket precisely lists the sawing data for each slab. In this step, Lasa Marmo provides feedback if the use of the material could be planned more economically. The entire process—from material inspection, planning, and blending to quality control, production, and acceptance—is thus digitized.

In the future, Keller plans to open up the tool to other quarry operators and thus to other types of natural stone in addition to Laas marble, thereby “giving the industry new momentum.”

The Gardens of the Year: On February 17, 2022, a jury selected the most beautiful private gardens and best product innovations for the seventh time.

For the seventh time, Callwey Verlag and Garten + Landschaft, together with numerous partners, organized the Gardens of the Year – a competition aimed at landscape architects, garden designers and manufacturers from German-speaking countries. They had until July last year to submit private garden projects and innovative products. On February 17, 2022, the jury selected the 50 most beautiful private gardens and awarded the €5,000 first prize and five commendations. Read more about the winners here.

All Gardens of the Year should show in an individual way how the open space becomes an extended living and enjoyment space. The focus should also be on a strong idea to which plants, materials and products are subordinate – no small details, but a convincing overall concept. The requirements were best met by the first prize winner: a private garden in northern Germany, “Im Garten der alten Schmiede”.

All photos: Ferdinand Graf Luckner

Horeis+Blatt Partnerschaft mbB, based in Bremen and Verden, was responsible for its design. The landscape architects designed a garden in which “I would like to sit by the fire in the evening with a glass of red wine”, begins the laudatory speech by Petra Pelz, landscape architect and last year’s winner. A glass of red wine by the fire sounds like a garden in the countryside. However, the winning garden is located in a historic city center. The brick building is also not an old smithy, but a new building. The architects developed the image of an “old smithy” together with the clients as a design line, which Horeis+Blatt Partnerschaft mbB took up in the garden: Artistic structures made of rusty steel, moats, wooden decks made of old oak wood and Belgian clinker paving. The old trees of copper beeches and hornbeams are a stroke of luck: they complete the illusion of the “old forge”.

In addition to the first prize, the jury honored five other gardens that offer a wide range of inspirations: The smallest garden among them, for example, shows on just 84 square meters how the colour spectrum of the “Indian summer” transforms the Krefeld terraced house plot into a piece of nature. The 1,500 square meter award-winning garden in Bremen is also blessed with lush planting. What makes it special: The landscape gardener Cordula Hamann designed it there 30 years ago. It has been preserved in its original form with its large pond to this day.

As part of the competition, the jury selected the solutions of the year for the fourth time. Product innovations in the field of garden design such as garden sheds, flooring and plant innovations are honored here. In 2022, the jury presented 13 awards and one 1st prize, which went to constila Stauraumlösungen GmbH (Herzebrock-Clarholz) for the mechanical parcel boxes Bea and Ben.

All 50 gardens and the 14 solutions of the year are documented in detail in the Gardens of the Year 2022 compendium, which features over 350 color illustrations and garden plans on 320 pages. The publication also includes a tribute to the garden photographer Gary Rogers (* January 01, 1938 – † July 06, 2021). The recipient of many awards, he is one of the best in his field; his photographs have accompanied numerous books and magazines.

The 50 private gardens, the work of Gary Rogers and the 14 solutions of the year will be on display in an exhibition in the model garden complex in Grugapark Essen. The exhibition will take place from July 1 to August 28, 2022. Further information can be found here.

Dieter Kosslick / Konstanze Neubauer
Gardens of the Year
The 50 best private gardens 2022
2022. 320 pages, over 350 color illustrations and plans
23 x 30 cm, hardcover
€ [D] 59.95; € [A] 61.70; sFr. 80.00
ISBN 978-3-7667-2555-4

BGL Bundesverband Garten-, Landschafts- und Sportplatzbau e. V., bdla Bund Deutscher Landschaftsarchitekten, BSLA – Bund Schweizer Landschaftsarchitekten und Landschaftsarchitektinnen, DGGL Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gartenkunst und Landschaftskultur e.V., GaLaBau Verband Österreich, Jardin Suisse – GaLaBau-Verband der Schweiz, ÖGLA Österreichische Gesellschaft für Landschaftsarchitekur, Garpa, Baum & Bonheur – Die Lappen Baumschule, Giardina and Schloss Dyck as well as Callwey Verlag and the media partners Garten + Landschaft with the New Monday platform, Mein schöner Garten, GÄRTEN and Gartenpraxis

The winners of the Gardens of the Year 2021 can be found here.