Exteror walls on multi floor building

[Dave Lewis]

I have a 10 story building and I was wondering whats the best approach for the exterior walls. Say the building is 140' high and every floor is the same on the exterior. Should I draw one wall with a top constraint of the roof or should I draw the first floor and copy the walls to every floor? Whats the best approach?

[ron.sanpedro]

I have a 10 story building and I was wondering whats the best approach for the exterior walls. Say the building is 140' high and every floor is the same on the exterior. Should I draw one wall with a top constraint of the roof or should I draw the first floor and copy the walls to every floor? Whats the best approach?

For me it depends on two guidelines.
1: Model it like you build it. So for residential work, I model each wall as only going up to the next floor. A wall in a double height space would be taller. A concrete wall in a mid-rise would be one wall all the way up, as would be a curtain wall system.
2: Deviate from the above where it helps the design process, but go back to Guideline 1 for DD/CD phases. So, in a house I might start with a two story wall, to keep alignments easy. When I decide to do a little bump back on the first floor, THEN I split that wall horizontally so I can adjust just the first floor walls. But at the beginning of DD, I would split everything to match actual construction, and accept the added coordination of doing so. First off, there shouldn't be as many changes once in DD, and if the wall locations are tied to Grids then coordination is minimal. But I still like having a single wall in SD because my concept of the wall is a single plane. Only in DD do I change from my design concept of the wall to the builders concept of the wall.

I hope others have some ideas here, as I think it is a great philosophical topic with very practical applications.

Best,
Gordon

[Henry D]

You might want to do a search on this question since there have been other threads dealing with this. My own preference is to make one wall non-stop from top to bottom, not separate walls for each level. The big advantage of this approach is that it's much simpler to deal with one wall instead of ten. Also, I think the file size will be smaller and therefore faster.

[Dimitri Harvalias]

If you are working alone (no other consultants using Revit) then I prefer to model each wall to its full extents. If it goes from the ground floor to the roof and it's the same type and location make it one wall. Same goes for structural elements. I just find things easier to manage this way.

As we get other consultants involved we may have to model in a slightly different way to help them out. If you create a column as a single, ten storey element your structural engineer can import/link that column into their model and have Revit split it at each level so their analytical model is correct but in the process you lose the ability to use the copy monitor features. Talk with your consultants and o some experimenting to find the best approach.

[mibzim]

Particularly with walls, the joing geometry tool is useful here as it allows you to model one wall ten floors high whilst still showing the correct wall/ floor join if walls are structural and support floors. As HCSL noted though, it is important to model correctly when consultants are involved.