Explore the process of determining the structure and layout of walls in a building design project. This article guides you through the steps of identifying curtain walls, concrete walls, and full height walls, as well as how to position them relative to other architectural features such as stairs and parapets.
Key Insights
- The process of identifying and establishing walls in a building project involves determining which walls run full height, which are curtain walls, and which are concrete walls. This is done by examining the design and extrapolating the details.
- When drawing walls, it's important to set the location line appropriately. When changing a wall type, it will use the location line as the new center line. Therefore, adjustments may be needed to keep the walls in the correct positions.
- When designing, it's important to think ahead to the construction of the next level. Having an understanding of where architectural pop-outs will be, for example, can guide the creation of the floor plate for the next level.
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When we look at our finished product here, you can see that there are a few walls that are going to run full height from level one all the way up to top of parapet. And so what we can do is we can go ahead and we can start establishing some of those. So you can see here all along this edge here at the edge of the stair, once we get that drawn in, it'll be easy to determine that.
But we can clearly see that some of these level one ones are going to be curtain wall. The entrance wall is going to be curtain wall all the way to top of parapet. This will be curtain wall, the angled wall here.
And all the way around on our base below this larger portion of level two, that's all going to be curtain wall up to level two. And then we have some full height walls that are going to go all the way up, which will be concrete here. And so we can easily go in on our model, and we can make those changes now before we start drawing in the rest of level two.
If I wanted to, I could say these three walls here, it's pretty safe to assume that those are going to be curtain wall going up to level two. And what I want to do is if I draw a wall, just as an example here, if I draw a wall with the same finish face exterior extent here on this grid line, just so we can use it as an example here. And then if I put the same wall at this location, but I have it set to wall center line, what happens is when you switch to something like wall one or exterior storefront, it'll use that point, which is your location line as the center of the wall.
And so if you wanted it to stay centered on here, or if you wanted it to stay roughly in the same location, then you want to make sure you have your location line set appropriately. If I were to change this to storefront, you can see it's going to hold it back to this point here because it uses the location line as the new center line for the curtain wall. So it's just something to keep in mind as we create this, these walls are going to shift around a little bit and we will have to make some modifications to keep them in play.
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And so whether you change them to center line now, there's still going to be a couple inches off because that's a five inch mullion or five and a half inch mullion that we're using. And these are eight inch walls. If I were to select all three of these here, and then I know these two, this one and partially that one.
We'll split that one first, but I know that these ones going all the way across here, those are all going to be curtain wall. If I change those to, we'll use that storefront option here, then it'll change them all. And I'm going to get joining errors because the corners are weird.
And they don't have a corner mullion on them. If I say unjoin elements, not a big deal. And then it's going to delete some of the mullions because they don't line up the way they want.
Again, not a big deal. Then I can go in and I can make the adjustments necessary because you can see these previously lined up at a nice corner and same here. But when we look at the wall, if I were to just move it kind of arbitrarily, you can see that it doesn't quite hit the slab edge.
And so what I do here is I'll grab this wall and I'll move it from the face of mullion down to the face of the slab. And then I can do the same thing with this one here. If I just move it back a bit and you definitely don't have to do the overmove and move it back if you're comfortable and you can identify the lines pretty easily.
But the first couple of times, it's a little hard to see where it is. Another trick you could use is you could change your visual style from hidden line to wireframe. And then you can clearly see where that line is.
The one thing that I would advise against on this one is you just really have to make sure you put it back because I see this all the time where these plans are always left in wireframe instead of put back to hidden line. So you just want to make sure that you're staying on top of that. And so you can see it gets a little crazy in some of these locations and that's not a big deal.
But we can also move it from this point to the previous center line. And I just want to double check to make sure that I'm hitting that slab edge exactly where we intended to. Looks good.
And so you see I don't see any extra lines here, but I do here. That just shows me that I hit it at the point where I wanted it to be. Okay, and we do have a lot of cleanup work that we have to come back and do for these curtain walls.
But we'll definitely get to that. So I'll go into 3D here. I know that this one is going to go up to top of parapet, so I'll go ahead and make that change now.
And then I know that these two are going to go up to top of parapet, so I'll change make those changes now. And this will just be a helpful guide for when we draw our second floor plan. So then I'll go back into level one here and we're going to have a two foot square column that's going to split between where there's curtain wall and there's going to be a concrete wall here.
And so what I'll do is I can draw a reference plane or a detail line or whichever you use to create construction lines, but I can give myself a point here that's one foot away and that can be my split point. And so I know everything from here up is concrete and I know everything from here down is curtain wall. So then I can make that change for this piece to be curtain wall, which this will have to be broken down into a couple pieces because it is going to be level one only down here.
And then where we have the stair, it's going to run full height. So since these ones didn't stay joined, I'll use trim extend to corner to join that corner. And then I'm going to go back to my 3D view here and I'm going to go ahead and send this one up to top of parapet.
And now I've kind of got an idea of where I'm going to have my architectural pop-outs. And again, here is a little weird because we are going to have this wall run full height and so it's not completely accurately shown, but we will get that location here in the next video when we draw in the floor plate for level two.
