Working with curtain walls

In a lot of design projects that you're going to be working with, you'll always want to incorporate a little bit more than just drywall for the interior walls. Usually you'll want to add in openings for windows and things of that nature. One of the things that Revit has is called Curtain Walls. These are non-bearing walls That are consisting of glass patterns that you can lay out on the grid. While window Elements can be used for Interior Walls to create maybe a single window, a Curtain Wall can create a totally different effect.

It can give you an expansive glass to allow a lot more light to come into the interior spaces. So lets review the various Curtain Wall types. And there basic four elements that make them up. First of all there's curtain wall one. This one is just the blank glass wall when you bring it in. That's all it's. You take that blank wall and go ahead and design on top of it you know, use grids and A mullion layout to make it work.

Curtain wall basically you can determine what its length is, and what its height is, just like you would with any other wall. Exterior glazing is different in that it's again, another glass wall but in this case you get grid lines that go along with it. You can edit these grid lines by going back and forth. And every time that you look at a grid, there's also created a glass panel. So you have a little bit more flexibility with this because you don't have to do it by scratch, you've got something to work with, and that's what makes the exterior glazing wall maybe sometimes a better option.

The store front is already pretty much made up. It does have mullions, and everything is at a specific spacing. The spacing happens at a vertical and horizontal distance depending on how you draw the wall initially. The layout is locked. And in order to edit this, you have to unpin everything. So those are some of the issues that you have with that particular wall. The other thing is is that there are a number of elements within a curtain wall. You have the glass wall itself, then you have a panel, you have a grid, and you have mullions.

And then on top of that you can also place within the wall, a curtain wall door. Most of the time curtain walls do not create a uniform pattern. Some of the distances between grids might not be exact so, you will at times have to directly edit the curtain wall as far as where the grids are and placement of mullions. Let's take a look at these in Revit. We're basically in a Revit project here.

And we're going to draw the basic types and take a look at them. Let's go to Wall. And go to Architectural. And what I want you to do is use the type selector, go all the way down to the bottom and you'll see ,a type called Curtain Wall, and then there's the three types. Curtain Wall 1, Exterior Glazing, and Storefront. Pick Curtain Wall 1 first. And then come out here and draw basically a wall that's 15 feet long. And hit enter. Let's go up to the type selector again and pick exterior glazing and just come over a little bit and draw another 15 feet wall. And we'll pick up the last one.

Which is the store front. And basically do the same thing for 15 feet. So initially in the process of doing things, you would draw off the curtain walls in floor plan view. Then after you're done with that, you would click modify to get out just as you normally would with a normal wall. Now let's take a look at what they are in elevation. We're going to come over here to elevations and click South. And you'll notice that here's our three walls.

Here is curtain wall one which shows no grids at all. Curtain wall here that shows the gridlines and then here's the storefront that shows the molains and everything in there. The other thing is let's go ahead and click on the first one and you'll notice that you have some drag grips here. And if you look a properties, just like walls you can go ahead and change some of the properties here. Well right now my top constraint is not connected.

If I click on level two and I'll bring it over, it will drop it down. You can do the same thing with the others just by moving em. And if you notice here we lost part of our grid layout, with this group, and with this one too, we'll bring it down. And you'll see that it changed as well as far as the volumes are concerned. So the size does matter. If you pick over on the side going this way, you'll notice that it does create some additional grid lines.

And if we did the same thing on this one, it too will go ahead and create uniform panels. The only one that doesn't have anything going on is curtain wall one. The other thing is, is that, it's a good idea when working with walls to come down here and change the visual style to consistent colors. And this way you can actually see the glass because you're going to be working on top of the glass in order to create a grid and the mullions.

Additionally when you click on a grid, you'll notice here that you have dimensional ability to change things, and this can be moved back and forth if you unpin. So this is part of the way that you would go ahead and be able to move things back and forth. When working with curtain walls, the first part of the procedure is to draw them in floor plan view. Set up any constraints between the levels that you need, and then switch to an elevation or section view to work on curating your grid and your mullions.

It's best to use an elevation view. Make sure that visual styles consistent colors is on so you can take a look at your work, how it progresses.