Best Practice - Curtain wall panels in staggard coursing

[T_Livingston]

I am looking for a better way to generate my composite wall cladding in a curtain wall WITH a staggard coursing pattern. I cannot use a filled region as I need to schedule the panels.

As of now I use a curtain wall system without vertical coursing then nest another curtain wall system with vertical coursing (mullions) so that i can offset the entire row (excel ref.) to my needs. I do this for every row needed in elevation.

This blows when I have to add a grid because I then have to add a grid seperately to each row for every course.

I would like to keep the curtain wall as one element but still manage each row as needed. Please ref attachment.

Thank you

[rosskirby]

You're talking about the block wall in the image, right? And you've got that built as a curtain wall because...you need to count the blocks? I'm not sure I follow.

Wouldn't it be easier to do a material takeoff of a basic wall and just divide the area of the material by the area of a single block?

[Mike Sealander]

He's doing Alucobond or some such composite metal, in running bond. You might take a look at the adaptive grids now available for curtain systems. I haven't used them yet, so can't be much more help.
However, since all your panels look about the same, why don't you just build the composite panel skin as a finish wall material using a model pattern similar to concrete block in running bond? Then you could just divide the area of the wall by the area of each composite component, as suggested.

[T_Livingston]

Thank you for the responses so far. The reason I am using the curtain wall system is that I need the width and height of each panel. Our product is a light weight stone composite panel. We recieve the stone material (granite, marble, limestone, etc.) in varying slab sizes but mostly 4' x 8'. We then have to export the panel dimensions into a sheet optimizer, maximizing the utilization of the panels from the slabs.

Is there a better way to stagger the mullions (joints) to achieve the coursing needed?

[aggockel50321]

Might be a pita, but you could try this:

Use a single curtain wall for each wall.

Add the horizontal curtain grids.

Add two vertical curtain grids, and then remove every other segment in each to create the running pattern.

Once two are created, array them across the wall to finish the pattern.

[sbrown]

Make 2 types of curtain walls with diff. spacing. then make one curtain wall type with only horizontal divisions (so it has a horizontal grid line every 2' or whatever the panel height is. then pick the bottom panel and swap it with the first wall type, then the second row gets the second wall type and so on up the wall. You could default the panel to one of the wall types and then just offset the grids of every other row too.

[cliff collins]

This is an perfect example of where it would be nice to be able to place Curtainwalls into Stacked Walls.

I'll check all the Wishlists and post if it's not already there.