1 DESIGN 3 MARKET SEGMENTS

PortalWall® did not come from a whiteboard or a research grant. It came from work in the field — real projects across punched windows, window wall, and curtainwall — where assemblies behaved differently than drawings suggested they should.

The Rubin Museum of Art was one project, among many, this one in particular revealed a fundamental gap in understanding: interior moisture diffused through conditioned spaces, reached a colder exterior plane, and condensed. It happened despite excellent architects, respected engineers, and careful construction teams. That one failure made something very clear and began a long, personally curated effort to understand how walls actually behave, not how they are assumed to behave.

• CURTAINWALL

• WINDOW-WALL

• SITE-BUILT STUD WALL + SHEATING

The first façade family is CURTAINWALL.

Curtainwall was where the problem was easiest to see.  Energy codes — IECC, ASHRAE 90.1, NFRC — make one expectation explicit: opaque assemblies must perform as walls.

Curtainwall geometry with continuous verticals, coupled together, does not allow this. The opaque region is forced into a glazing-based frame profile. Cavity depth is shallow, thermal paths zig-zag, and the opaque area has no autonomous space to function as an insulated assembly.

The lesson from curtainwall was not that curtainwall is “wrong.” The lesson was structural: opaque and vision must be decoupled if the opaque region is ever going to function properly.

The second façade family WINDOW WALL.         A USGlass article made public what field experience had already revealed: window wall although decoupled faces geometric limitations. The spandrel — though different in position and assembly — vertical metal framing with thermal bridging, fragmented insulation paths, and no opportunity for vapor control to align with thermal logic.  Window wall therefore became the second major market where a re-thinking of the opaque zone can become an impactful path forward.

The third façade family is the conventional metal-stud wall assembled on site.
Across decades of observation, the same failure patterns appear repeatedly: sequencing vulnerabilities, weather exposure during critical phases, workmanship variation across crews, and the requirement for dozens of individual steps — each of which must be executed flawlessly in uncontrolled, outdoor conditions.

This method also depends on exterior access systems, typically pipe scaffolding or swing-stage platforms. These introduce: additional fall-protection and insurance exposures, prolonged façade exposure to rain and wind, field application of moisture-sensitive materials, and hidden wetting conditions that reveal themselves only after enclosure failure.