Explore the intricacies of interpreting architectural blueprints, more specifically, the journey from the living room to the foyer, up the stairs, and the elements encountered along the way. Become acquainted with the process of visualizing and understanding the nuances of space, dimensions, and the features of a building through a close analysis of its floor plans.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed walkthrough of analyzing an architectural blueprint, from the living room to the foyer, up the stairs and the various spaces encountered along the way.
- Special emphasis is laid on understanding building sections, dimensions, and symbols such as brake lines, center lines, and how they convey specific aspects of the building's design.
- There is also an explanation of how certain areas like those marked as 'open to below' are handled in terms of spatial representation and square footage calculations.
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.
What I'd like to do next is to go up to the third level, so I've gone from the living room back into the foyer. Now let's just zoom in a bit. I have the note here in the foyer that says open to area above, so this is a volume space here in the foyer.
I go up the stairs right here. You can see that I have a break line right here at the stairs, so if I'm coming up the stairs you can see a break line that's happening right here. If I were to walk down the stairs and go back into the butler's pantry and open the door, you can see that once again I have stairs that go down and a break line showing that the stairs are going down.
So let's go up the stairs, and I'm going to zoom back a little bit, and let's go to the next sheet, which is the basement, and I'll go to the third sheet, which is the upper level. Now this again is the top floor of the house. You can once again see that we're calling and referencing our building sections throughout the drawings, so again it's the same slice that's occurring in the building.
I'm just going to zoom in. Again, you see the building sections. You can see the dimensions, so it's 10'3 from the center line of the window to the right-hand face of this wall.
So what I have going on here is I'm in the bathroom right here, but here's the bathroom and closet area. I'm going to come down. I see the laundry room.
There are double doors. You can see that I'm in the vestibule. There's a note here that shows open to below.
Here's my elevator over here, and once again the bedroom. I have another open to below. So typically when we have areas that are open to below, we tend to use this kind of a line, which we call a center line.
The center line generally draws an X in the area to show that the space is open, and also when we calculate square footage of a floor, we typically do not include open-to-below areas within the square footage. Typically we do not include that. So again, you can see that we have a symbol right here saying to look at detail 4 on page D72 to see the section through the railing.
You can see here that I have some symbols that will be for skylights that are above, and we'll see those on our roof plan. Well, we've finished reviewing our floor plans. What we're going to be doing next is to go to our building sections.
If you would, please spend some time reviewing the plans, and let's continue on in just a few minutes.