Discover the intricacies of understanding a floor plan, from big picture views of the entire building to minute details such as structural grids and dimension anchoring. Learn how to decode detail callouts and gain insight into critical aspects such as room names, room numbers, door numbers, and more.
Key Insights
- The article details how to understand the layout of a building from a floor plan, including details like the shape of the building, parking areas, and access points.
- It explains the meaning of different symbols and callouts on the floor plan, such as detail callouts that direct to an enlarged view of a specific area, structural grids that depict the alignment of columns, and dimensions that are anchored to these grids.
- The article further explains how to identify room details like room names, room numbers, door numbers, and floor elevations from the floor plan. It also explains how to interpret wall sections, building sections, and other key elements on the floor plan.
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Let's begin looking at the floor plan with a big picture view. If you look down here in the bottom left corner, you can see that this is a key plan. This item right here represents the entire building.
This area that's hatched or shaded represents what we're seeing in this drawing. If you look at the shape, I'm just overviewing the shape of the building. Now this again includes parking and access, and so you can see that there's a driveway that comes in, parking down in through here, a ramp down over to here, and exiting with a gate over here.
Big picture view. Now let's just focus our energies up in this area. You can see there are these blue areas that are surrounding this stairway.
Next to the blue edge is a detail callout. What this means is go look at Image 1 on Sheet A701 to see an enlarged view of this area. Similarly, I have an enlarged indicator here.
I look for the line that touches it, and this is saying look at Image 4 on Sheet A4.42 to see this enlarged women's men's locker room plan. We have another enlarged area in through here, and it's saying go look at Image 1 on Sheet A7.11 to see that area. Let's zoom back out.
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When I look at the central courtyard, I see a symbol right here in the middle. This is going to be an elevation callout symbol. So the work is not yet completed, but it will be telling us to go to a certain page, certain sheet, to see the views looking in the four directions from the courtyard.
If you look around the perimeter of the drawing, and let's just zoom down into here. When you look at the perimeter of the drawing, you can see these circles with lines. These circles with lines are the structural grids for the building.
So I can see right here, and look up here, and up here, that I have columns. You can see that these columns are on grids, so there's an alignment that goes right down there. So this is grid line SN.
There's a grid here that also goes through those columns. So this column is located at the intersection of grid S4 and SN. I can see here that I could look at Image 1, A305, to see the section that is cut through here.
There's going to be an elevation looking sideways, an elevation looking straight up, a section going through here. This section is saying, go to Image 1, Page A307, and the section cut will be looking to the right. And when we get to building and wall sections, I will show you these in their totality.
I have an enlarged plan. For the transformer area, you can see here, when I look at the walls, there are different patterns that are going on. So there's concrete hatching here, concrete here, concrete here.
This is probably indicating that we have a one-hour-rated wall assembly. Again, what we're trying to do with rated wall assemblies are to protect people when they're going in and out of the building on a stairway. And now let's look at some dimensions.
You can see that the dimension between grid NF.5, from this point here, over to grid NG, is 13 feet 8 inches. So from this dot here, which indicates the center line, to this dot here, it's 13 feet 8 inches. From this next column, it's 11 feet 8 inches. If I follow up to here, you can see that the dimensions are anchored to the grids.
So what they're showing is, there's paving—essentially a raised curb that is right here. And they're showing that this face of the curb, from this extension line over to the grid, is 10 feet 3 inches. And then from the face of this curb here, with this extension line, to the face of this curb over here, is 24 feet. So again, you can see the dimensions are typically anchored to the grid.
And that makes totally logical sense. Because what's going to be built first? The columns? When they pour the columns, or form for the columns, they need to know centerline dimensions, typically, from column to column to column. And then everything is built after that.
So they are purposely anchoring the dimensions to the structural grid. So let's pan over. Again, we're seeing consistencies.
We're seeing that we have dimensions that are going centerline to centerline of the grids. We're seeing dimensions anchored to grids. We have some dimensional anchoring in through there.
We have an indication here for a wall section. Again, Image 5, A324. The wall section is cut through here.
It's looking to the right. And with this little polyline, we can see what's going on. The door number is right here.
We have the room name, room number, the elevation of the floor right there. You can see here's the door into the main electrical room, that the centerline of the door is 5 feet away from grid N6.5. We have a building section that's cut through the building here, looking up. This is a partial section.
Looking up, Image 6. We know it's a partial because it ends right there. We have a finish for elevation of 6 inches out here in the garage. We go through these doors.
We walk up steps. And that brings us into a room that has a floor elevation of 5 feet 7 inches. Let's continue our review of this drawing in our next video.
