Cladding Design – Shop Drawing Review and Engineering

In modern buildings, the Architect often delegates the design of the building cladding, which includes architectural panels, windows, storefronts, and curtain walls to the contractor, who then delegates it to a specialized subcontractor. This requires the subcontractor to provide engineering for the system to assure it is appropriately attached to the building and that it will function in that it won’t fail under load, or have excessive deflections. This is where structural engineering plays a critical role in ensuring code compliance and performance under design loads.

We have extensive experience in working with contractors helping them review shop drawings for architectural wall panel systems. We’ve worked with ACM, corrugated panels, and other architectural wall panels. Our projects have been quite extensive throughout the Northeast and Southeast US. We have worked with contractors erecting architectural panels in New York, Washington DC, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, and other locations. Our structural engineering team brings detailed analysis and code expertise to these projects, ensuring safe and reliable installations.

We have done extensive work with ACM panels. The calculations for these panels are rather specialized and must consider that these are very thin shells, which do not behave like other conventional shapes.

In addition, there are connections in the design to be considered. Generally, the failure of these panels tends to be in the connections to the building, so experience in this work is critical.

We have reviewed shop drawings for cold-formed steel used to infill walls on buildings as part of the delegated design to wall contractors. We have extensive experience with cold-formed steel as a main structural material for buildings and the exterior walls of buildings.

Finally, we have worked extensively with aluminum curtain walls and storefront framing. These systems are typically made from aluminum, which requires familiarity with the requirements of the Aluminum Design Manual and how the products are installed.