Delve into the technical world of architectural abbreviations, symbols, sheet identification, and material legends. This article provides a comprehensive breakdown of these integral components that form the essential language for architects and construction professionals.
Key Insights
- The article explores the various disciplines within architecture, each having its unique set of abbreviations, symbols, and notes. For instance, DWG represents drawing, and GYP symbolizes gypsum board.
- The piece further explains critical elements such as the symbols legend, which includes the north arrow, column designator, and room number information. These are typically found in site maps, civil engineering drawings, and most plans.
- Apart from the abbreviations and symbols, the article also underscores the importance of sheet identification and material legends, common in the national CAD standards, and present in reflected ceiling plans and elevations.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
This page includes the architectural abbreviations, symbols, sheet identification, material legend, general notes, and also the remaining sheet indexes from the previous page. So let's look at the abbreviations in this area. Each discipline typically provides an abbreviations list at the beginning of their set of documents.
So these are the architectural abbreviations. Structural would have theirs, and other disciplines would have theirs. So you can see that these are two to three to four character words like DWG for drawing, GYP for gypsum board.
So again, different abbreviations that you'll see used in the set of construction documents. Then we have the symbols legend, and we will be showing you these in action when we get to the appropriate drawings. But for example, typically there will be an indicator under the drawing that shows the name of the drawing, its position on the page, and the page on which it's located, and then also the scale of that drawing.
This is the north arrow, so you can see there's a heavier line pointing up. Site maps, civil engineering drawings, and most plans typically include a north arrow. We have the column designator.
You'll notice when we get into the building that everything's going to be paired off of structural grids, and so grids have letters and numbers associated with them. So that would be the structural grid designator. Information about the room numbers, where there's the name of the room, the room number included there.
Learn Blueprint Reading
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
We have the designator for the building elevations, so you can see that there's a big hat. There would be a drawing number and a sheet number, so we will see these on the outsides of the building when we're looking at a plan. And so this will be the reference to say, go look to image number one on page A4.3. We have interior elevation callouts, so you can see that there's one here that will point to four separate interior elevations.
This would point to one interior elevation, and again it's saying, go look at image one on sheet A3.4. We have a wall section indicator, so we have a big hat and a thickened polyline, and again we'll see all of these on the plans, but this would again be pointing to say, go to page one on sheet A3.5. We have a revision cloud. We have the door number, a wall type designator, a building section. So the building section looks a lot like the wall section indicator, except that we have two big hats, so we would have a line that connects the two big hats, and this would say, go to image number AA on sheet A4.01, and the building section cut is happening right there.
A fixture tag, a detail reference, door and window designators, elevation datum callouts, which are including the height of the ceiling. We also have spot elevations. We'll see those on the civil drawings, and then we have information about dimensioning, and we'll cover that in detail when we're on the plans.
We have the sheet identification. This is much like what we went through on the previous page. Again, you can see professional discipline, a dash, the sheet number, again calling it the designator, and again these are right out of the national CAD standards as far as the discipline nomenclatures.
We have material legends. We will see these on reflected ceiling plans. We'll see them on elevations.
We will have certain patch patterns on the drawing that we'll be referencing to certain types of materials, so it's on this page that the overall listing is provided, and then we have the general notes. We've just finished our abbreviated review of abbreviations, the symbol legends, sheet identification, material legends, and general notes.
