Architectural Plans Explained

architectural plans are so entrenched in the fabric of architecture that they just seem natural like they must have been there from the beginning of time and it would be unimaginable to conceive of architecture without them while non or soon-to-be architects might need to learn how to read a plan to architects are like a second language a way of describing the world that they can think through with absolute fluency in this video we'll discuss exactly what an architectural plan is how they got to be so important to architects and some of the hidden results of their use stay tuned hello my name is stuart hicks and i teach architectural design studios and lecture courses at the university of illinois in chicago i remember the first time that i saw an architectural plan my mom had one of those house plan books that you might buy in a department store i asked her what those drawings were and i didn't understand the explanation so i don't really remember what she said but either way i asked her why she had the book she just liked to look at the plans and imagine what it would be like to live in one of those fancy houses that are depicted in the pages she tried to get me to dream with her but at the time i just couldn't see it i just wanted to be back at my nintendo to play super mario brothers apparently i was just more into sections than i was at plans anyway even my mom who is certainly not trained as an architect was able to understand the language of the architectural plan and while i didn't yet understand how to read one when i was seven she could look at one and imagine an entire life inside she could imagine where she would put the bed where she would eat dinner where she might put the christmas tree there's so much information encoded in a plan drawing those black marks on paper can become the springboard to all sorts of imagined ways of occupying space if i showed her or you or even me a different kind of house plan things might be a little bit different the building in this one is far less familiar to us even though we know it's a plan for a house i still can't tell where the kitchen is at first glance this is a plan drawing of an ancient roman house a house for people that live very differently than we do today there are courtyards for open air rooms for servants versus rooms for owners and the lifestyle that this building supports is unknown to us and therefore unreadable to us today but the plan still offers a glimpse into the lives of others and how they saw their homes even though architecture seems completely unimaginable without plans a drawing like this one was never used in the design of this house that's because it was built before plan drawings were a tool for architects to pre-plan out buildings that's not to say that plan drawings didn't exist before this they can actually be traced way back to ancient egypt but it really wasn't until the renaissance that an entire structure would have been conceived beforehand recorded as a planned drawing and then a building built from them architectural plans are called grundrus in german which really which literally translates to ground cut in the english language this is fitting because the practice of drawing plans for planning purposes began with the need to stake out and dig foundations for the building in this sense plans are related to map making surveying and geometry as they all revolve around measuring marking out and drawing on the earth's surface i have a whole video on geometry and how it evolves from surveying so if you haven't checked out that video i'll do you solid and link to it in the upper right corner the plan was seen as a footprint of the building like one might understand a footprint in the sand but today architectural plans aren't exactly like a footprint and that's true for a number of different reasons rather there are a series of conventions that govern the making of architectural plans so as to ensure that they can be read without misinterpretation by everyone universally although misreadings do still happen one reason that architectural plans aren't exactly footprints is because they're not really a depiction of the ground imprint anymore rather they're the result of an imaginary cut about four feet or so off the ground the height off the ground varies but the four foot height is one that most closely aligns with where the most amount of visual engagement with the building will take place so at four feet you're cutting through most windows and doors but above the things like countertops so that you can see the countertops or the stove top inside of the plan drawing then a plan requires us to rotate the building to the plane of the paper or the screen so that it's parallel to it but now comes the tricky part right now if we're looking at the house from above we're seeing it in perspective which means there is a phenomenon called foreshortening which describes how things closer to us appear larger than things that are further away so when we look at the sliced house in perspective the floor appears smaller than the cut walls even though we know that this isn't the case so in order for the drawing to be accurate to the dimensions of the building we actually need to distort it or distort how we're looking at it in order to achieve that effect one way to achieve this is to pretend that we are super far away from the house but zoomed way way in this gives the effect of less distortion think of this like the dolly zoom in movies where the camera is simultaneously moving away and zooming in at the same time the subject seems to change proportion and less background is in frame as we get further away if we were able to get infinitely far away and zoom way way way in the foreshortening would go completely away the floor would appear to line up with the wall this kind of drawing where the house has turned perfectly to the page and we're infinitely far away is called an orthographic drawing where the ortho refers to the fact that everything is 90 degrees while we can draw buildings without doing this magic trick they would no longer conform to the codes of architectural drawing plans that doesn't stop some firms like atelier bow wow to make them anyway theirs are beautifully drawn snapshot glimpses into buildings to view the life inside however architects tend to prefer planned depictions of buildings that aren't explicitly drawing how people occupy the space inside rather showing the abstract geometrical relationships between rooms the theorist robin evans explains the architectural preference for this kind of drawing by comparing two kinds of paintings both with the same subject matter a woman who's tracing her boyfriend's shadow but the one on the left is by a painter and the one on the right is an architect who just kind of dabbles in painting and his name is carl frederick shinkle in the painting on the left the woman is tracing the shadow as projected by a candle the rays of light are projecting outward in triangular cones from the candle source onto the wall behind the boyfriend this results in a distorted shadow on the wall not a true depiction of the boyfriend's silhouette the shingle painting on the other hand is using the sun as a light source the sun is so far away that the rays of light could be considered parallel and don't distort the shadow so the size of the boyfriend's resulting silhouette is basically the same size as the boyfriend himself resulting in a depiction that is more dimensionally accurate so architects prefer this kind of view the one that's dimensionally accurate in order to think of the light ray analogy as a way of looking at something all you have to do is reverse the light rays the painter's depiction is like looking at the face from nearby while the architect is looking at the face from super far away in some way you might consider it a god-like view of the world due to this imaginary distance that you have to be above the building in order to obtain that vantage point not only are the results of this kind of drawing more accurate dimensionally it also means that there is no single point of view in order to create it if i look at a house from above in perspective it looks different based on the position of the camera or our eye the floor appears to shift relative to the cut line of the wall however with orthographic drawings this isn't the case and it mimics a more omnipresent view seeing everywhere all at once all of the time as such plan drawings allow us to see into many rooms at the same time even if those rooms would be closed off to someone that was actually experienced the space in person looking from here i can see the bed at the same time as i see the oven even if someone in the house couldn't they also allow us to see inside of the walls most of the time modern walls have a single thickness determined by their construction so a typical exterior wall in american house like the one that i've been showing is usually a type of construction called platform framing which is a sandwich that includes outer materials to keep out the wind a wrapping to keep out rain plywood to attach it all to the wood studs structure inside with insulation between the studs then a layer of drywall and then an interior finish the whole sandwich might be around 8 inches thick or so and would normally be relatively constant all around the perimeter of the house however the exterior walls might be of a kind of construction that could vary in thickness and buildings like the monadnock building in chicago which is the largest brick structure in the world has walls that are six foot thick at the base the base is made out of bricks so that they're structurally sound enough to hold up the rest of the building the thickness also changes as you go up the building so the upper floors are thinner and lighter than the bottom ones while the thickness of the monadnock building changes from floor to floor it's basically the same all the way around the building at that particular height but this also isn't always the case and sometimes the shape of interior rooms are of a different shape from the outside of the building and this requires walls to change in thickness to accommodate the competing requirements from the inside and the outside the resulting changes in thickness normally filled in black in a plan is called poche which is a french term for pocket because it's the space between two other spaces a number of architects are really fascinated by the shapes that poche can make and people like lou khan would actually go visit ancient stone castles and painstakingly draw their plans studying their poche but usually architects are about making plans that are concerned with the spaces that are either outside or between the walls and plans are really good at showing flat ground and floors but requires inventive ways to show off other conditions for instance bulges in the ground like hills which are often depicted with contour lines that are indications of imaginary slices that allow us to visualize height changes even though we're looking at something directly from above we can also depict changing material conditions on the ground in plans like the difference between carpet and tile or wood and plans are great at drawing or composing intricate plans on important floors like in lobbies often material changes are accompanied by changes in program or use like you want tile in the bathroom but wood in the living room and plans are really good drawings to lay things out often architects are given a set of requirements beforehand in the form of a program which lists the expected room uses and their sizes the plan then becomes an early stage depiction that allows architects to place things in space with important connections and adjacencies intact like it makes sense that the kitchen would go near the dining room and it's easy to see the benefits of that relationship in the planned drawing plans are also really good at showing where people can move in unbroken and continuous ways you're able to see both outside and inside the building simultaneously in a plan spaces that are dedicated to the movement are people are is often called circulation space and different architects have different attitudes toward how they break up spaces for movement versus spaces that are for prolonged activity some might see spaces of movement as opportunities like in the trail house where the architect basically traced a park trail and turned it into a structure other architects might see the space of circulation as a waste of space and attempt to eliminate it entirely like the moriyama house by sanaa which is a house made only of scattered rooms on a site with no hallways so plans are an important tool that architects use to understand and design the world plans haven't been around as long as buildings have but at this point it seems difficult to conceive how we design and build without them however even though they're everywhere they have bias they're good at certain things and not as good as some others and it's important to keep that in mind the kinds of things that tend to go unnoticed are precisely the things that we should pay the most attention to have a good one everybody [Music]

Channel: Stewart Hicks

Views: 312,631

Keywords: architecture, design, architecture student, architecture design, how to architect, design school, architecture lecture for beginners, architecture 101, architecture school, architecture drawing, architecture documentary, architecture concept, architecture history, architecture theory, home design, Architectural Plans, Architectural plan drawings, architecture tutorial, how to, floor plans, floor plans of houses, plan drawings, what an architect does

Id: 8opn2McSc0E

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021