Walls Overview

Location Line

A wall’s Location Line property specifies which of its vertical planes is used to position the wall in relation to the path you sketch or otherwise specify in the drawing area. When laying out compound walls that join, you can place them precisely with respect to a particular material layer of interest, such as the concrete masonry units.

Regardless of the wall type, you can select any of the following planes, either on the Options Bar (before placing the wall) or on the Properties palette (before or after):

• Wall Centerline (default)
• Core Centerline
• Finish Face: Exterior
• Finish Face: Interior
• Core Face: Exterior
• Core Face: Interior
  NoteIn Revit terminology, the core of a wall refers to its main structural layer or layers. In a simple brick wall, the Wall Centerline and Core Centerline planes would coincide, whereas they would likely differ in a compound wall. When you draw a wall from left to right, its exterior face (Finish Face: Exterior) is at the top by default.

In the following example, with the Location Line value specified as Finish Face : Exterior, the cursor is placed on a dashed reference line, and the wall is drawn from left to right.

If you change the Location Line value to Finish Face : Interior, and draw another segment along the reference line in the same direction, the new segment is placed above the reference line.

When you select a single wall segment, the blue dots (Drag Wall End controls) indicate its location line.

Once a wall is placed, its location line persists, even if you modify the structure of its type or change to a different type. Changing the value of the Location Line property for an existing wall does not change the wall’s position. However, when you use the Spacebar or on-screen flip controls to switch the interior/exterior orientation of a wall, the location line is the axis around which the wall flips. So if you change the Location Line value and then change the orientation, it may change the wall position as well.

Note that the position of the blue dots does not change until you deselect and reselect the wall.

Wall Function

All wall types within the Basic Wall and Stacked Wall families have a type property called Function, which can have the following values:

• Interior
• Exterior
• Foundation
• Retaining
• Soffit
• Core-Shaft

You can filter the display of walls in a view to show/hide only those walls that serve a particular function. When creating a wall schedule, you can also use this property to include or exclude walls according to function.

Related Topics

• Function of Walls, Floors, and Building Pads
• Schedules

Compound Walls

Just as roofs, floors, and ceilings in Revit can consist of multiple horizontal layers, walls can consist of more than one vertical layer or region. The position, thickness, and material for each layer and region are defined through the type properties of the wall.

You can add, delete, or modify individual layers and regions, or add sweeps and reveals to customize the wall type.

You can add, delete, or modify individual layers and regions to customize the wall type.

For basic information common to multi-layer elements in Revit, see Compound Structure. For information specific to compound walls, see Working with Compound Walls.

Stacked Walls

In addition to the Basic Wall and Curtain Wall families, Revit includes a Stacked Wall family for modeling walls that consist of 2 or more distinct subwalls stacked on top of each other.

Structural Walls

All wall types within the Basic Wall family have an instance property called Structural Usage, which specifies whether the wall is non-bearing or one of 3 kinds of structural wall (bearing, shear, or structural combined). When you use the Wall tool, Revit assumes you are placing partition walls. Whichever wall type you select, the default Structural Usage value is non-bearing. When you use the Structural Wall tool, and select the same wall type, the default Structural Usage value is bearing. In either case, the value is read-only, but you can change it after the wall is placed.

Documentation for structural walls is provided separately under Structural Modeling.

Embedded Walls

Walls can be embedded into a host wall, so that the embedded wall is associated with the host wall. For example, a curtain wall can be embedded into an exterior wall, or a wall can be embedded into a curtain panel. Like doors or windows in the host wall, the embedded wall does not resize if you resize its host. If you move the host wall, the embedded wall moves with it.

Curtain wall embedded in host wall

For more information, see Embedding Curtain Walls.

Wall Joins

When walls intersect, Revit creates a butt join by default and cleans up the display in plan view by removing visible edges between the walls and their corresponding component layers. The view’s Wall Join Display instance property controls whether the cleanup applies to all wall types or only to walls of the same type.

You can change how the join displays in a plan view by selecting a different join option (Miter or Square-off) or by specifying which one of the walls butts up or squares off against the other(s). You can also specify whether the join cleans up, does not clean up, or cleans up according to the default setting for the view. For more information, see Changing the Configuration of a Wall Join.