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Floor Plan

A Floor Plan is a Top View or Birds Eye View Drawing of the Interior of a Building

A floor plan, or floorplan, in architecture and building engineering is a diagram, usually to scale, of the relationships between rooms, spaces and other physical features at one level of a structure.

Dimensions are usually drawn between the walls to specify room sizes and wall lengths. Floor plans will also include details of fixtures like sinks, water heaters, furnaces, etc. Floor plans will include notes to specify finishes, construction methods, or symbols for electrical items.

It is also called a "plan" in architectural terms, as opposed to "elevation" which means how the object will look when seen from a side, or a "cross section" where the building is shown cut along an axis to reveal the interior.

Overview

Sample floor plan for a single-family home Similar to a map the orientation of the view is downward from above, but unlike a conventional map, a plan is understood to be drawn at a particular vertical position (commonly at about 3 feet above the floor). Objects below this level are seen, objects at this level are shown 'cut' in plan-section, and objects above this vertical position within the structure are omitted or shown dashed. Plan view or "planform" is defined as a vertical orthographic projection of an object on a horizontal plane, like a map.

The term may be used in general to describe any drawing showing the physical layout of objects. For example, it may denote the arrangement of the displayed objects at an exhibition, or the arrangement of exhibitor booths at a convention. Now drawings are reproduced using plotters and large format xerographic copiers.

A "reflected ceiling plan" shows a view of the room as if looking from above, through the ceiling, at a mirror installed one foot below the ceiling level, which shows the reflected image of the ceiling above. This convention maintains the same orientation of the floor and ceilings plans - looking down from above. Reflected Ceiling Plans or RCP's are used by designers and architects to demonstrate lighting, visible mechanical features, and ceiling forms as part of the documents provided for construction.

Floor plan topics

Building blocks

A floor plan is a top view or birds eye view drawing of the interior of a building. A floor plan chould show:

Interior walls and hallways
Restrooms
Windows and doors
Appliances such as stoves, refrigerators, water heater etc.
Interior features such as fireplaces, saunas and whirlpools
The use of all rooms shall be indicated

Plan view

A plan view is an orthographic projection of a 3-dimensional object from the position of a horizontal plane through the object. In other words, a plan is a section viewed from the top. In such views, the portion of the object in above the plane is omitted to reveal what lies beyond. In the case of a floor plan, the roof and upper portion of the walls may be omitted.

Roof plans are orthographic projections, but they are not sections as their viewing plane is outside of the object.

A plan is a common method of depicting the internal arrangement of a 3-dimensional object in two dimensions. It is often used in technical drawing and is traditionally crosshatched. The style of crosshatching indicates the type of material the section passes through.

Floorplanning

Floorplanning is the act of designing of a floor plan, which is a kind of bird's-eye view of a structure.

In electronic design automation, floorplanning takes in some of the geometrical limitations in a design. Examples of this are:

bonding pads for contacting off-chip (often using wire bonding) are normally located at the circumference of the chip;
line drivers often have to be located as close to bonding pads as possible;
chip area is therefore in some cases given a minimum area in order to fit in the required number of pads;
areas are clustered in order to limit data paths thus frequently featuring defined structures such as cache RAM, multiplier, barrel shifter, line driver and arithmetic logic unit;
purchased intellectual property blocks (such as a processor core) come in ready defined area blocks;
some IP-blocks come with legal limitations such as permitting no routing of signals directly above the block.

Examples

Typical basic house floor plan. A sample floor plan for a single-family home.

A sample floor plan of a Caravanserai. An office plan.