This tutorial walks through understanding architectural drawings: floor plans, elevations, building sections, wall sections, and details, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.
Gain a deeper understanding of the different types of architectural drawings used in construction documents, including floor plans, building elevations, building sections, wall sections, and details. Each of these terms represents a unique view or slice of a building, providing varying levels of detail and points of perspective.
Key Insights
- A floor plan represents a horizontal slice through a building, typically measured about 4 feet 6 inches above the finished floor or ground plane of the building.
- Building elevations and building sections offer vertical slices of the building, with the former providing an external perspective, and the latter an internal viewpoint. These, along with floor plans, are usually shown at the same scale throughout a set of drawings.
- Wall sections and details provide more specific information, zooming in closer on certain areas within the drawing to portray greater detail.
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Blueprint Reading Checklist
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Drawings can be at different scales on the same sheet.
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Bubble references point to specific detail sheets.
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Symbol meanings vary between projects.
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Triangle marks identify changed areas — date of revision matters.
I would like to spend a few minutes explaining to you the difference between a Floor Plan, Building Elevation, Building Section, Wall Sections, and Details. Typically, a Floor Plan is a slice that's happening through a building, and the slice is normally measured about 4 feet 6 inches above the finished floor or ground plane of a building. So a Floor Plan is a horizontal slice through a building.
An Elevation is a view that is outside of the building that looks straight on at the different sides of a building. We have Floor Plans that are horizontal slices through the building, Elevations that are vertical views of the exterior of the building. A Building Section is a vertical slice that happens through a building.
The Floor Plan, the Building Elevations, and Building Sections are normally shown at the same scale throughout a set of drawings where the Floor Plans, Elevations, and Building Sections relay information at the same level of detail. We also have something called a Wall Section. In a Wall Section, we are zooming in closer on some specific information so that we can show even more detail.
Last but not least, we have a detail itself. With a detail, we are really zooming in on information provided within the set of construction documents. We have a Floor Plan, which is a horizontal slice through the building.
We have Elevations, which are exterior views looking directly at the building. We have Building Sections, which are slices through the building. We have Wall Sections, which are enlarged areas within the drawing.
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And we have Details, which are providing yet more information on the drawing. These are the typical kinds of information that we 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 may be referred to as views, drawings, plans, details, or even images. These words are interchangeable in most situations, but drawings will usually be the best word for describing these views.