A practical guide to getting your project ready for museum-quality daylighting, so our team can help you design the right solution for your space, your occupants, and your performance goals.
Kalwall has been helping architects design perfect daylight for generations. The most successful Kalwall projects don’t start with products. They start with people.
Before you worry about panel thickness or performance values, step back and look at the spaces you are creating:
The spaces you design are as varied as the people who use them: athletes, students, travelers, and operators all rely on daylight in their own way.
One of Kalwall’s unique advantages is delivering daylight without sacrificing privacy. In sensitive environments: like locker rooms, clinics, or control centers. Kalwall’s translucent systems provide visual separation while still letting in the light occupants need to feel comfortable and alert.
Kalwall is often chosen for big, high-impact spaces where daylight is doing more than just meeting code. It might be:
Capturing that intent up front helps our team tune the amount and distribution of daylight to your design goals.
Not every space needs the same kind of light, or for daylight to play the same role. In some places, it needs to fade into the background. In others, it should shape the experience. Sometimes it’s about energy performance. Sometimes it’s about atmosphere, or attention, or access.
Kalwall systems are engineered, not off-the-shelf panels. Many of the key decisions are driven by performance requirements you likely already have on your project:
Be sure to include any environmental loads: like snow, wind, or seismic considerations when reaching out. These parameters help our team so we can suggest the most efficient and code-compliant solutions, including specific face sheet and panel configuration. It’s really helpful to have these requirements captured and clear when you reach out.
Kalwall shows up as part of an envelope strategy: facades, clerestories, skylights, skyroofs, canopies, and specialty forms.
At early design stages, you do not need to know the exact panel configuration. Instead, think about:
You may not yet know exactly how large the openings should be, and that’s okay. Our team can provide guidance based on desired light levels, room dimensions, and orientation. Even rough sketches are enough to begin collaborating on optimal size and shape. From there, our team can suggest whether a wall system, skylight, skyroof, canopy, or a combination makes the most sense, and how those systems should be detailed.
Most projects are too important to leave daylighting to rules of thumb. We use local weather files, building orientation, and local site specific conditions.
Once you have defined the use of the space and your rough openings, Kalwall can support you with:
Instead of trying to select a specific light transmittance or grid pattern on your own, bring us your goals. We’ll use modeling and decades of project experience to propose options.
Every Kalwall project delivers the same essential daylight character: soft, diffused light that reduces glare and controls contrast. The differences in facesheets and finishes are driven first by performance:
Within those performance needs, we can explore colors and finishes that complement your material palette and help create the visual effect you are after, without sacrificing safety or long-term durability. The various amounts of insulation types will dictate the amount of light that comes in.
You do not need to walk into the conversation knowing the name of a facesheet series. You just need to be clear on how the building must perform.
Kalwall is often used as a basis-of-design solution. A thoughtful specification helps:
We can help you:
The more we understand about your goals and constraints up front, the more targeted our support can be.
To make this easier on busy project teams, we have turned these considerations into a simple, two-page Kalwall Daylighting Pre-Spec Checklist.
Use it to:
Once you have completed the checklist, you will have everything you need to start a focused conversation with Kalwall and to move more confidently toward a solution that supports your people, your design, and your long-term performance goals.
