Making curtain systems work for you.

We have a very large office building, which has now been designed to have raking walls, with shaped panels between windows from floor to floor. All the walls will have a slight rake so the detail needs to be able to turn around the corner. The other thing is the cladding panels will be various colours. Some of these colours are specials, so we need to be able to schedule the panels to make sure we have enough area to justify the special colour fabrication.

Because of a panelised system, using Curtain System seems a sensible approach. As the system is more on the complicated side of things, a mock-up is an essential part of ensure the system will work, especially with the scale of the job.

My first mock up looked like this.

The obvious issue that has come up is that Curtain panels don’t wrap very well around corners. However mullions wrap very well around corners.

So in my development I ended up going away from the conventional the resultant shaped panels are actually Mullions with a specified profile. Mullions can act exactly like panels. We can schedule them and know they will view correctly in plan, section and elevation. The actual Revit panels have just be switched for empty panels. The glazing below is standard glazed curtain panels.

This is a direct example about how doing mock-up studies will greatly assist in the long run.