Curtain wall butt joint glass

[gerald.untario]

Hey all, I have just found a way to make a butt joint in a curtain wall. I am not sure whether this is already well known or not but I just got to know it.

1. Create a curtain wall, and delete the corner mullions.
2. The two adjacent panels at the corner, choose the panel and change it to 'empty'.
3. Create a new wall of 10mm thickness, or whatever thickness for the glass you want it to be, and change the material to glass.
4. Draw the 'glass' wall you just made, and offset the base and the top to 50 and -50 respectively, IF you are using the default mullion of 50x150 rectangle.
5. You can use the disallow join to then adjust the 'glass' wall accurately, to allow the silicon joint.

See attached for example.

please comment!

[greg.mcdowell]

What is the advantage to this over using curtain wall panels? Inserting doors and windows would be easier (though you'd still need custom families to remove the frames.. what else? Also, if you use this for butt glazed do you also use it for normal storefront/curtain wall?

[gerald.untario]

Well, you can remove the frames by dividing the curtain wall with grids, then delete the mullions as you like. This method is only used at the corner panels, where butt glazing is needed. If the other part of the curtain wall is straight / not butt glazed then you can just use corner mullion or just use the glazed panel, there is no need to switch it off and use the 'glass' wall.

[phyllisr]

...the 'glass' wall...
We tried this in the early days of our migration to Revit and abandoned it very shortly thereafter. I understand the convenience but since the cut line for the wall is typically thicker than the cut line for the glass panel, it looked pretty awful in both plan and section.

Attached is an alternate solution that we like (though there are many solutions). Use at your own risk - this is a very old example we used for an internal curtain wall training session and other than opening and upgrading, I have not looked at it in years and it really needs some updating.

It can be a little tedious to swap all the panels at a corner but it works. We treat the overlap as the "glass bead." I really need to update the Glazed with Extension panel (we stole Robert Manna's negative offset trick and use that for all our curtain panels now) but I just have not gotten it done. Also need a negative offset for the end if the panel is interior of center. I hope that you can deconstruct this and understand what I did.

If I ever get around to fixing this, I will post the improved version.

[dzatto]

Here's how I do it:

Create a basic wall that is the same thickness and material as your curtain wall panel.

Instead of changing the panels at the corners to empty, just select them and choose your wall. It will insert the new wall and automatically replace the panel (just like inserting a door). I'd do this before adding the mullions, otherwise you would have to do it for every panel. You can add the mullions after.

Select the wall you just inserted and adjust the location line offset property as needed to align the new walls with the curtain wall panels. It's usually half the thickness of the curtain wall panel. Once they are aligned on adjacent curtain walls, the newly inserted wall panels will clean up just like any other wall.

You can also change the line weights of the wall to whatever the curtain wall panels are.

I got this from a friend who got it off a blog somewhere. It works great.