Master the complexity of construction documents by understanding how to efficiently trace information across a set of drawings. This article outlines the importance of building sections, how to read and interpret them, and how they provide crucial details about a construction project.
Key Insights
- This article emphasizes the crucial role of building sections in construction documents. These sections provide detailed 'slices' of the building, revealing essential information about areas such as the garage, stairwell, and bedrooms.
- Building sections offer important visual cues for understanding the project. For instance, indicators show the direction in which the section is cut and viewed, helping to orient the viewer within the construction design.
- The article also discusses the value of keynotes and symbols within the sections. These elements provide additional context, guidance, and specifics about the construction details, making the sections easier to comprehend and apply in the field.
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One of the beauties of construction documents is successfully tracing information across a set of drawings. And so again, we have the building sections. We have the building section indicators.
If I want to see this building section, I go to that page. And you can see this is saying image one. So image one is a slice that's going to be going through the garage and the stairwell.
That same slice is going to the master bedroom. If I go to the image itself, you can see that here are the images that we were just talking about. Here's the garage.
Here's the basement. Here's the stairway. Here's the master bathroom.
So this slice through the building is the same slice that's being referenced here. You can also see, looking at the image, that it's showing a big hat looking to the right. So what this is telling me is that when I go to image one on that page, that the building section is cut here.
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But it's looking towards the right. So again, there's the slice, and you can see that's exactly what I'm doing. So again, References to other information.
I have references to other details. I have keynotes that are telling me what's going on. I have my datums.
I have some symbols happening down here, again, with their notes telling me more information. I'm going to go on to the next building section page. And a similar kind of thing.
This is the longitudinal section. This is image one on A42. Image two on A42.
If I go back, you can see image one on A42 is a slice here looking up. Image two is a slice down here looking up. So again, I'm going to see the open area to the right of the bedroom.
And here's the bedroom looking there. If I go back to that page, you will see here's the master bedroom, and here's that open space we were just seeing. Again, typically, the keynotes for plan drawings are all the same, typically.
Typically, all the keynotes for all the section drawings are the same. It makes it a little bit easier for people in the field to know that if they're on a section, if they're looking at symbol 10, symbol 10 conveys the same kind of information. But different offices do it differently.
If you look at this image down here, you can see that we're slicing through the building. I'm also showing the building elevation in the background shaded back. So I'm going to slide back.
And so once again, you can see here's the slice. Here's the building in the distance. Again, this slice is looking up.
So this part of the building is not in the section, but what I'm showing in the building section itself are the elevations in the distance. So this is a quick overview of the building sections themselves. If you would please spend some time with these drawings, and then we will be continuing on with the elevations in just a few minutes.
