Explore the concept of architectural drawing in the design of public restrooms, which includes intricate details like the reflected ceiling plan legend, finish plan, floor plan, interior elevations, and cabinetry and vanity drawings. Learn how structural grids, dimensions, interior elevations, and other details are used to create blueprints that adhere to standards, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Key Insights
- The architectural drawings of a public restroom include the reflected ceiling plan legend, finish plan, floor plan, interior elevations, and cabinetry and vanity drawings. These drawings display detailed dimensions and structures of the restroom, including the structural grid, wall measurements, and room names.
- Architectural planning ensures adherence to specific guidelines and standards, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. These standards dictate various measurements such as clearance requirements, the positioning of fixtures, and the placement of grab bars in the restroom.
- Architects, engineers, and designers often use symbols and legends within their drawings to indicate similar features or designs across different sections of the project. These markers help to maintain consistency and clarity in the plans.
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Let's look at some enlarged drawings for the public restroom. If you look over here on the key plan area, you can see where this restroom is located. We have a reflected ceiling plan legend, a finish plan, reflected ceiling plan, the floor plan, interior elevations, and cabinetry and vanity drawings.
If I zoom into the public restroom itself, the floor plan, you'll notice that we have our structural grid. You'll notice that dimensions are anchored to that grid. So this double wall, like we saw between the two units on the guest room plans, it's nine inches on either side of the structural grid.
We have the icons here for the interior elevations. We have a dimension right here for minimum floor width. We have wall information, dimensions inside the stalls, room names, and you'll also notice that on this toilet area that there's a revision cloud.
There is a note up here that points to this toilet compartment as an alternate handicapped accessible toilet compartment. You'll notice the structural grids over here and here. And there's also the dimension anchored to the grid to the face of the EPAS system.
In the reflected ceiling plan, you'll see that there are materials that are hatched that will designate what the finish is of those rooms. There's the location of the fixtures, and there's also indications of the ceiling light. You'll notice that the dimensioning for the light fixtures is essentially face of wall to center line of the toilet cabinet to inside face of the cabinet.
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And so these lights are positioned equally between both faces. You'll notice here the dimension goes from the outside face of the toilet stall to where the ceiling drops down above the vanity, and those light fixtures are positioned center line equally between those two dimensions. Similarly, on top of the vanity, equal, equal, center line of fixture from where the ceiling drops down to the actual wall.
You'll notice that there's a wall section. It's on sheet A457, image nine, that's going through this double wall. There's another one over here that's obscured by that call out, but we know that people will take care of that before the drawings are completed.
And we have the finished material drawing. There's a legend over here for the reflected ceiling plan. If we pan the drawing, we can see interior elevations.
You can see that all the men's interior elevations are on one line, women's on the other, and then we have details up above that. The men's elevations are all at quarter inch equals a foot. You'll notice that right here, there's a detail that's calling to two similar cabinetry drawings.
There was a revision where they added this particular PT5 call out. You'll notice that this image here and this image here are saying that they're similar. You'll even notice on the women's drawings, it's similar here and similar here.
What that means is that the detail presented might be a reflected image where one is looking one way and then it's referencing an image that's looking the other way, but they're saying that all of these would be similar to one another. There would be a legend calling out the contents, like here's the ADA grab bar, toilet paper dispenser. We are on page A441, but you can see that there are section cuts that go here, here, and there's a similar over here.
Here are those actual details. They're saying that image 11 and 12 would look just like this. This, which is probably for a baby changing area, would look similar to that.
If we look at the details, you can see that there are some clearance requirements. There's an 8-inch clearance that's required from the face to the beginning of the angle. There's a minimum dimension from the floor to the underside of the lip of the vanity.
There's a maximum dimension from the floor to the top of the vanity. These are in accordance with Americans for Disabilities Act requirements, as is this 11-inch minimum clear. This is so that somebody on a wheelchair can comfortably pull themselves in.
References over here in the men's bathroom to those same vanity countertop images. Haul-outs in the ladies' room for different requirements. We have a detail of the vanity.
You'll notice that this image is at 1-inch equals a foot. For every 1-inch that's drawn, it represents 12-inches. This detail is at 3-inches equals a foot.
So you can see how much larger this detail is than that. So this reference right up here, 13A441, points to this 13A441 image. And there we have the bathroom drawings.
Frequently, there will be a separate sheet included within the set that's a set of standard details for Americans with Disability Act, which is why, when you go in many restrooms yourselves, that you'll notice that the grab bar is always a certain distance on either side of the toilet, a certain height above, that the toilet paper is always a certain height off the floor, that there's always a certain amount of space. A turnaround radius provided within the bathroom and recently within the actual toilet stall itself. Again, as architects, engineers, and designers, we're doing the best that we can to provide comfortable bathroom venues for our citizenry.
Let's go on to our next drawing.