Walls: Embedded Walls

Welcome to this tutorial on embedded walls. Although this is one of the more simple “tools” within Revit, it is still very useful and often overlooked by the beginner.

The concept is that you can easily embed one wall type within another. Why would you want to do this? Well, you may wish to add a section of curtain walling into a larger masonry wall. You may with to add a rendered panel of masonry into a brick wall, as a feature panel. With a little imagination you will probably come up with lots of uses for this procedure.

So rather than “drone on” with lots of text, lets just dive in and produce an embedded wall.

Start off with a new, blank Revit Project file. First of all draw a section of wall. Don’t worry about it’s length, it’s height or it’s type- just produce something that looks like the image below….

And here it is in 3D…..

It’s pretty uninspiring at the moment! So lets embed a section of Rainscreen into it. Go back to the plan view (Level 1) of your wall. Select “Wall” command again- this time change the Wall type to “RainScreen”….

Now draw a small section of wall directly over the existing wall…

You should just be able to make out the shorted section of wall in the centre of the first wall. What you will notice when you place the second wall is the Warning Message that immediately springs up in the corner of your screen…

And it’s the last line of the Warning message that is central to this Tutorial: The use of the “Cut Geometry” tool.

What the warning message is really saying is this: The two walls (as you have drawn them) have no “proper” relationship- using the “Cut Geometry” command will “formally” embed one wall within the other. So let’s do that now!

Select “Cut Geometry” from the Tool Bar…

Now simply select the larger wall first, followed by the smaller wall (the one you want to embed). And there you go- Job done. Switch to 3D to take a look at the result….

A couple of things to note:

The embedded wall behaves just like any other Revit Wall- it has all the same parameters available (ie you can control it’s base and top with Levels, etc)

The embedded wall is fully “hosted” by the larger wall- meaning that moving the larger wall results in the hosted wall moving with it (ie just like a door or window)

Lets’ make some changes to the embedded wall to demonstrate that no flexibility has been lost. Let’s change the embedded wall’s base and top constraints…

Results in…..

One of the more useful applications of this concept is the embedding of curtain systems into solid walls. In the image below you will see how I embedded a Curtain System into a solid wall to form a glazed viewing screen into a sports hall…