How Should Floor Plans Be Created

This post may seem unnecessary. But unfortunately, it’s necessary.

Floor plans should be created using the “Floor Plan” function in Revit. This is the standard modeling practice in the industry. Floor Plans allow for Rooms to be place on these views which is a 3-dimensional element in Revit. When elevations and sections cut through the Rooms in plan, the Rooms can be tagged to provide the same Room information as it does in plan. This properly preserves the information from plan to section and elevation, hence the purpose of BIM.

Floor plans should NOT be created using the Area Plans function. This is absolutely incorrect and is not an industry standard. Area Plans only allow for 2-dimensional information and should only used for plans that only require 2-dimensional information, such as GFA calculations, room usage diagrams, means of egress calculations, etc. If an elevation or section was used to cut through an Area Plan, the “Areas” would not be shown in section or elevation and could not be tagged, and that’s because “Areas” are only 2-dimensional elements in Revit. If you needed to label the rooms in section and elevation, you would have to resort to manually adding text notes to annotate the room information. This action of manually adding information is going backwards into the CAD days and defeats the whole purpose of BIM.

This post was necessary because some architectural models have been found to use Area Plans as their floor plans instead of the Floor Plan tool. You can imagine the amount of work required to recreate the plans for a high-rise apartment project, especially if the conversation occurred near the end of CD, and nothing could be done to rectify the situation. This is even more daunting when it was learned that the “standard” at the architectural office was to use Area Plans. Model managers will be weeping.

It’s important that as we move through the third decade of Revit, that we continue to improve our use of Revit to maintain the BIM philosophy. Information needs to be preserved throughout and to do this we need to use the tools we have properly to benefit all teams.