Verical wood siding installed on a curved wall

Installing a Wood Rain Screen Vertically on a Curved Wall

Written by Chris Nolan on Tue, Feb 21, 2017 @ 06:02 AM

The Climate-Shield® Rain Screen System™ has been praised for its unique ability to be installed vertically, easily and effectively. Climate-Shield has been acclaimed by architects and design professionals because it is unnecessary to create redundant matrices of furring strips for fastening wood rain screen siding vertically. It affords builders and construction professionals ease of installation, labor and material costs savings, even more so on a vertical rain screen .

Property owners can also be comforted by the fact that their wood rain screen is not only beautiful – it is a high performance system that is engineered to protect their investment and reduces life-cycle costs markedly. A well-designed wood rain screen that stays dry and drains properly extends the lifetime of the entire structure. The natural wood cladding creates lovely curb appeal and helps increase the value of the property.

A unique design opportunity exists for architects with curved exterior walls. The Climate-Shield system can be used to clad curved wall surfaces with radiuses as tight as 24”. It can be designed and built for use around large columns, turrets, spires and more.

As an example, Climate-Shield was installed vertically on the bartizans (turret shaped spires) at the US Coast Guard Station at Indian River Inlet in Delaware. The turrets have a radius of roughly six feet, so the Climate-Shield system was able to easily handle this curved surface, beautifully, for this vertical wood rain screen installation. To help create a great-looking arc, narrower (1x4 nominal) Ipe hardwood siding boards were used. Narrower boards look best and work best on tight radiuses such as this project.

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As another example, the vertical rain screen cladding used on the new Sandy Hook School in Connecticut had a gentle loping arc along the entire front façade wall of the building. Because of the large radius, the design team was able to use wider boards (6" nominal width) in this rain screen installation. On this project two different FSC® Certified wood siding species (Garapa and Machiche) were used to create beauty, contrast and visual interest.