The little PEOPLE'S Architecture Magazine: January 2016

While an architect's job is to design buildings, a large part of their job requires them to communicate their ideas out to others.
As the old saying goes " a picture speaks a thousand words". Before a building gets built, it is very hard for others to visualise how the building is going to look like with just verbal descriptions. Hence, architects need to depend a lot on visual communications to convey their ideas out to others.
Architectural drawings, henceforth, work as a means of communicating ideas, concepts and details.
They include drawings of different views of the proposed building. Here's a list of the basic drawings in a set of architectural drawings. The drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house and Mie's Farnsworth House has been used as examples.

Floor Plan

It is a drawn-to-scale diagram of a view from above showing the arrangement of spaces at a particular level of a building.Technically it is a horizontal section cut through a building (at about 1 metre above floor level) showing walls, windows and door openings and other features such as stairs, furnitures and fittings below that level.

Site Plan

It is a specific type of plan that shows the building in relation to its site or surroundings. A site plan shows property boundaries and means of access to the site and nearby structures.

Sectional Drawings

A section represents a vertical plane cut through the building. Sections are used to describe the relationship between different levels of a building.