Area vs. Room, information, graphics, and more

[damon.sidel]

Is there any comprehensive resource/discussion about the pros, cons, and best practice for Area Plans and Rooms? On almost every project I work (always in offices without Revit standards and often with people who are not entirely familiar with Revit), I seem to have a debate at some point about Area Plans vs. Rooms with regards to calculations, accuracy, uses, graphics, duplication of work, etc.

To compound this, the projects I have been working on are usually big enough to separate the structure from the main model and link it in. AND I work on a lot of concrete construction, so there isn't always a finish on the structural concrete wall... that is to say, the main model may not have enclosed spaces for all the rooms without additional room separation lines.

So I ask you: does anybody know of comprehensive resources/discussions on this topic? I'd like to have all the facts at my disposal before making a case for any particular method for any particular use. If nobody knows of such a resource, could you spend a few minutes and lay out your personal ground rules for using these two tools in Revit?

Thanks!

[Steve_Stafford]

Rooms are intended to define the rooms we use inside a building, within walls and work best to describe "net area".
Areas are meant to permit documenting more abstract ideas, gross area, rentable or other more idiosyncratic ideas.

In a shopping mall I'd use Areas to document tenants and Rooms to identify the "rooms" inside each tenant's leased space.
In a school or college I'd use Areas to document the gross building area, permeable vs impermeable surfaces, curriculum dedicated areas like Mathematics and Sciences
In a house I'd use Areas to document gross building footprint (by floor), hard scape versus soft scape and rooms to describe the space the owners live in and use.

I never think Area when I'm thinking Room, something I work or live inside. I think Area when "it" is bigger than a single "space".

For site and zoning documentation I use the property boundary tool to describe the lot area and setback.

Accuracy is in the eye of the beholder. I think it is necessary to declare when rounding or tolerance is applied to what people see (tags/schedules etc). If I create a room schedule that rounds to the nearest square foot then a note ought to declare that. Dimensional tolerance/accuracy is part of life and should be identified. Doing so can help avoid the, "I've found a miscalculation" conversation.

[damon.sidel]

Thanks for the clear description, Steve.

Follow-up question: how often to you use both Areas and Rooms in your projects? Always? Most of the time, but not always? 50/50? Only sometimes? Never?

[Steve_Stafford]

Just depends on the documentation needs of a project. I'd guess there's a reasonable use for Area plans on a majority of projects if for no other reason than demonstrating what the gross building area is, total and floor by floor.

[MikeJarosz]

This is always a contentious topic. There are multiple standards for measuring areas: BOMA, ANSI, REBNY, GSA. Each has its advocates, and the advocates don't agree with each other, let alone their opponents. In my experience, just go with your client's request.

[damon.sidel]

It's not so much about the area calculation itself, but the combination of project and model management, graphic standards, and calculations. We want colored plans. We want GFA calculations. We want labels in each "space" (may be a room, may be a portion of a room, may be a few rooms grouped together).

Since we want colored plans and the colors and labels correspond to the area calculation categories, one thought was to use the Area Plans as the primary building plans that get printed. I don't want to do that because I know we'll eventually want more technical, B&W, traditional building plans for our submission set and I don't want to develop the Area Plans with all the annotations, etc. and then have to switch. However, if we color the plans with rooms, currently that would mean duplicating our efforts since the Rooms would be the same as the Area Plan regions.

And this comes up on every project, so I thought I'd try to get a better understanding of Rooms vs. Area Plans and come up with some strategies and logic.

[Steve_Stafford]

If what your are doing is something "roomy" then you can probably get color fill to work based on parameters associated to rooms, like department or occupant or occupancy. You only need to reach for Area tools when the boundary that defines what you're after isn't accurately portrayed by the room boundary setting.

An open office plan might want to be tagged as open office but someone will ask for the area of the workstations. You can create room separation lines around workstations, place a room in each, assign a parameter to each workstation for Use and assign Open Office. Then a color fill can show all the workstations with the same "Open Office" color but you can work with each workstation as a unique room.

Others might prefer to create a room for the whole of the Open Office, determine how much area each type of workstation uses/provides and just create a detail view of the workstation to document that.

It also matters how you want to use schedules. If the workstations need to be part of a schedule it could be a furniture system schedule or if you use rooms it could be both or one or the other. A furniture system schedule can show workstation area as a parameter so it can be reported and provide totals without using rooms but they won't show up as a room in a room schedule.