This article provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the difference between architectural drawings including floor plans, building elevations, building sections, wall sections, and details. It illustrates how these different views offer varying levels of detail about a building's structure and geometry.
Key Insights
- A floor plan is a horizontal cut through a building, commonly made at about 4.5 feet above the level of the finished floor or ground level of the building.
- Building elevations and sections are vertical cuts through the building, with the former being outside the building and providing a view of the building's sides and the latter being within the building, offering more detailed information.
- Details and wall sections provide a more zoomed-in view of the building geometry, focusing on specific areas within the architectural drawings and allowing for greater detail in the construction documents.
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I would like to dedicate a few minutes to explain the difference between a floor plan, an elevation of the building, a section of the building, wall sections and details. Normally, a floor plan is a cut that is made through a building. That cut is usually measured at about 4 feet and 6 inches above the level of the finished floor or the level of ground of a building.
So, a floor plan is a horizontal cut through a building. An elevation is a cut that is outside the building and that looks directly at the different sides of a building. We have floor plans that are horizontal cuts through the building and elevations that are vertical cuts outside the building.
A section of a building is a vertical cut that occurs through a building. The floor plan, the elevations of the building and the sections of the building are normally shown at the same scale through a whole set of plans when they are transmitting information at the same level of detail. We also have something called a wall section.
In a wall section, we are getting closer to some specific information to be able to show even more details. Finally, but not least, we have a detail in itself. With a detail, we are really zooming in on the information provided within the set of construction documents.
So, we have a floor plan that is a horizontal cut through the building. We have the elevations that are outside cuts of the building looking from the outside. We have the construction sections that are cut through the building.
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We have wall sections that are areas expanded within the drawing and details that provide even more information about the drawing. These are the types of information that we typically show throughout a set of construction documents. It is important to remember that these views are representations of our building geometry as two-dimensional drawings.
These drawings can also be called views, drawings, planes, details or even images. These words are interchangeable in most situations, but drawings are usually the best word to describe these views. See you in the next video.
