Designing a Custom Canopy
When designing a custom canopy, there are many things that clients should take into consideration before deciding upon a final product. Canopy material, size, and style are only a few of the elements that should be considered in order to design and manufacture a custom canopy that will successfully meet your design vision.
Clients must first take into consideration the design intent of the custom canopy. There are unique differences between our array of high-quality aluminum canopy systems, which include walkway canopies, bus/parent drop-off canopies, gabled canopies and cantilevered canopies. Clients usually begin by referring to the style of the building that a canopy is attached to or will be installed beside. In order to establish design congruence, clients often seek to use the same style as the adjacent building when designing a canopy or selecting a canopy material. In this aspect, architectural context is crucial.
Canopy Materials and Loading Conditions
Different canopy materials are utilized to create each of these different styles, including various sizes of columns, beams, decking, flashing and gutters. Local building code and other engineering requirements often dictate the size and thickness of the material to be used. Even if you already have a specific custom canopy design in mind, you must consider the loading conditions for a canopy’s location. Loading conditions include live load, snow load and wind load. These conditions refer to the weather that a specific area typically experiences, and they are very important to keep in mind when designing custom canopies and choosing the canopy material to be used.
Live loads are loads that are produced during the life of the structure by movable objects, which do not include wind, snow, seismic or dead loads. Snow load refers to the amount of snow that your structure will likely experience based upon historical data, and wind load is the amount of wind force that your structure is required to withstand. These loading conditions affect the design of a custom canopy in many ways – for instance, the snow load in Georgia is much lower than the snow load in New York. Therefore, a canopy located in Georgia would be created using smaller posts, beams and smaller support members, whereas a canopy in New York would require larger columns and larger beams for more support. All of these elements must be taken into consideration when designing custom canopies or the structure will not be able to withstand the elements.
Size is also one of the most important elements to keep in mind when designing a custom canopy. Ultimately, you must decide if your canopy design is realistic. For instance, you could choose to erect a 16-foot-tall by 100 foot-wide canopy that could be created by utilizing column supports – but you would be unable to create the same canopy using over-head supports instead.
Conclusion
Each of these elements contributes to the aesthetics and design quality of your completed custom canopy. But most importantly, when designing a canopy, you must consider the location in which you wish to erect the canopy – custom canopies should be safely constructed and able to withstand all elements.
