Delve into the intricate world of construction documents, specifically the cover sheet, which serves as the first page and includes pivotal details about the project. Understand the significance of project directories, building information sections, revision numbers, occupancy classifications, and fire safety measures in a comprehensive construction project.
Key Insights
- The cover sheet of construction documents encompasses an overview of the project, including the name, address, project team, revisions, and building details. This snapshot provides a quick reference for all pertinent project data.
- Building information sections detail the codes and regulations that guide the design and construction process. This includes building, plumbing, fuel and gas, mechanical, and accessibility codes, among others. Additionally, revisions to these codes are documented and marked distinctly.
- An outline of occupancies is provided, detailing the specific use of different areas within the building. This becomes crucial when designing exit paths and widths of hallways, as the occupant load influences these aspects significantly. Furthermore, different fire ratings are assigned for various components of the building to ensure life safety standards.
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Let's look at the cover sheet. The cover sheet is the first page in the set of construction documents. You can see that it has a very nice rendering of our project.
There's always a location for the project name, the project address, the city, state, and zip code. There's an area with information for the professionals who've worked on the project. There's building information, and we'll be getting into this more in a few minutes.
There's the area site map, and over here on the right-hand side is what we call the title block. Usually the design professional will have his or her logo. The construction documents require that the drawings be stamped, so a copy of the architect's or engineer's stamp would be in this location.
There's a listing of the revisions, and the revisions are how the project is changed and updated over time. Revision dates are frequently included when you're going back and forth with the building department, and so the building professional will request or actually require certain modifications to be made to the set of construction documents, and so you would detail the date of those revisions right here. This format includes an abbreviated project image.
We have the project name, project address. This project had some corporate logos, and then we have information that calls the name of the sheet, the sheet number. In this area, the initials of the people who worked on the project are typically referenced, and there's an area down here that shows the date when the drawings were released for construction.
Now let's zoom over to the project directory area right over here. In the project directory, this is essentially the contact list. You can see that the owner developer, the company name, their address, who the project lead person would be, and his or her phone number and email address are included.
The same thing happens for the architect, the structural engineer, the MEP engineer. In this project, there was one company that was hired to do the MEP work, and MEP means mechanical electrical plumbing engineer. There's the civil landscape company and also the interior designer.
The building information section is where we have the most valuable information about the project detailed on the cover sheet. You see that we include the project address, city, state, zip. When we go to design a building, we don't just design a building.
We have to design the building in accordance with governing regulatory codes. So you can see that on this project, they're referencing the building code and the year of the building code, the plumbing code, the fuel and gas code, mechanical code, energy conservation code, and the accessibility code. All of these codes are typically regulated by the state.
We have the national electric code, and then in this project, we've updated to include safety codes for elevators, flood-resistant design and construction, and so on. You can see that there are revision numbers here and here. So what we've done is that initially, the drawings only included these governing codes.
For revision number one, we added these particular safety codes and flood-resistant design codes. We bubble them with the bubbles, and we reference the revision with the revision number. So you can see that there's a triangle with the number one.
So this was included in the first revision to the drawings. Then there was another update that showed a change in the addition to the fire prevention codes from when the building was initially designed. So again, we have the governing codes, and then we have indicated where revisions are with the bubbles.
We number the revision with the triangle and a number, and then another revision code. And the dates of these revisions are in the top right corner of the construction document itself. When we work on a building, we always have to keep life safety protection in the forefront of our design process.
This project is a mixed-use building. What that means is that we have different occupancy classifications, residential for the hotel, assembly for the lobby dining and lounge, assembly for the meeting rooms. There's an S2 occupancy for the parking deck and a mercantile area.
What happens in all of this is an occupant load or the number of people is established for each of these categories. For example, in the assembly area, we can pack a whole bunch more people into an assembly area than we would into the hotel room itself. Knowing these occupancies, then when we start designing things such as exiting patterns and widths of hallways, that we factor in the occupancy load so that we can safely let people egress out of the building.
There are accessory occupancies for storage rooms and the business offices. There's the incendiary accessory occupancies for smaller rooms. There's hazardous area protection.
For the bulk laundry, we want to make sure that there's appropriate fire ratings from all the heat that's going to be generated through the vents from the dryers. Then we have the different information loads for the residential. We're seeing the square footage that needs to be assigned per occupant when we have different kinds of occupant loads.
You can see that in an assembly area, a person is typically assigned 15 square feet. If we had a room, for example, that were 150 square feet, which is relatively small, that if we had 15 square feet per person, that the maximum occupancy load for that room would be 10 people. Again, we have the occupancy loads that are determined for each of these primary occupancies.
In the code summary, we will be telling the type of construction, and then we have to address parameters. Certain neighborhoods have certain height restrictions, and the number of stories. We can see that for this project at this address, the city allows a 12-story building, but our project is 7 stories.
The city allows 180 feet in height. Our building is 78 feet tall. Then we talk about the square footage of the largest floor.
We can see that it has these parameters right here, the unlimited allowance for these specific categories of primary occupancies, and what we're proposing. We're allowed unlimited, but we're proposing a 55,000 plus square foot for the largest floor, and we're showing that the building is sprinklered. Again, it's very, very important to think about life safety, and think fire, fire, fire, and how we can best protect the people in the buildings.
In order to make sure that we are appropriately protecting people, different components of the building need to meet specific fire ratings. You can see that the structural frame needs to be 2-hour, and this is addressing the table in the building code of that parameter. Bearing walls, what kind of fire ratings they need.
I'm not going to go down the entire list, but again, you can spend a couple of seconds and pause the vid, and just become familiar with the different kinds of fire ratings that are required for different scenarios within the building itself. Travel distance. One of the best examples of travel distance is dead-end corridors.
What it's saying is that in the hotel occupancy area, that when you have a door, an exit door at the end of the hallway, that exit door can be no more than 20 feet away from the end of the corridor. Then we have different travel distances that are allowed in different uses, and then we also talk about the common path of travel, the length, and whether it's sprinklered or not. Please feel free to watch this video again to make sure you really understand the important information, and I look forward to working with you in our next vid.