What Is a Floor Plan?

We had another great class this week! I asked for a volunteer to explain floor plans, and every hand went up. Last week we learned that a floor plan is what a building would look like if you cut all of the walls with a sword at four feet above the floor. Third grade boys love the image of slicing through walls with a sword!

I loved seeing the kids start to make sense of their drawings! The floor plans are taking longer than I expected, so instead of moving on to elevations this week, we focused on our plans and how to translate some of our classroom elements into scaled, 2-D drawings. We learned how to draw doors with the correct swing, base cabinets with a sink, and some tables.

Before we can start designing buildings to put together our city, we need to learn about programs, and how they translate into building design. The program is what informs the floor plan when designing buildings. It has design criteria information like what spaces should be included, how big the spaces should be, and what adjacencies are important to how the building will function.

I sent home an assignment this week to get the kids thinking about the spaces of buildings they are familiar with, and how they are related to each other. I asked them to analyze a building they choose: Their home, school, church, daycare, etc. Using the worksheet, they will list the key spaces of the building, put them into groups based on size, list a few key adjacencies, and list the rooms that have windows or doors to the exterior.

Next week we will talk about what they discovered in doing the Intro to Program exercise, and they are going to choose what building they want to design for our city. Then, I will give them some pointers on how to start turning their programs into building designs!