One of the architects I worked with once told me that at a high level plans should go from broad to detailed. But a complaint I hear from builders is that they don't like searching for details at way at the end of a set and want details to be located close to where they are referenced. Which is right?
Tell them to stop. Details have a very long and tried way of ordering. They weren't invented yesterday for some contractor's way of reading them. Having said all that, some miscellaneous and special details you might locate near where they are on the plan or other main drawings such as elevations and sections but rarely.
It's not hard to follow a detail reference to it's home a few dozen pages further into the set. It's also not our job to teach the contractor how to read. A well crafted set of drawings will be easy to read regardless of how the details are placed.
One of my favorite (historical) drawing sets is now a hundred years old; about 30 years ago I got to look at an old set of blue lines for as-built info.
On one sheet was a complete floor plan at 1/8". The only other item was a door jamb detail at half-scale, or 6"=1'-0, which took up a not-small corner. Goofy! I figured it was a late addition to the set by someone who didn't want to add a new detail sheet.
Try doing a set the other way…. when the contractor still misses something, they will complain you are structuring your set in a confusing way hahaha.
I have had a couple sets I worked on in locations where it was supposedly more common to do specific combinations of drawings that I found to be a bit atypical. I heard it referred to later by someone as a beaux-arts style drawing (don’t know if that’s historically accurate), where we included plans, sections, axons and even some details for specific portions of a building on single sheets. I personally liked the idea, but disliked the results in both cases, since it didn’t really restructure our whole set, and just threw some weird bloat in the middle in my mind.
One interesting side-effect of running an architecture firm inside and integrated with a real estate and construction company, is that we are no longer constrained by legacy industry conventions and can organize our drawings however we want to (and for maximum convenience to the people doing the building). That hasn't yet resulted in distributing details around onto sheets where they are referenced (plans, sections, elevations), but we have significantly re-organized how we do notation. Our window bugs now include a whole lot of detailed rough opening information which under old-style drawing organization principles would only be in the window schedule. That's the way the framers like it, and it speeds them up considerably. There are a number of other things like that we do as well.
Of course, that wouldn't be possible using old-style drawing production methods (hand or CAD), because of the coordination nightmares. But with BIM all those problems go away immediately.
I'm guessing this is less an issue of the builder needing to find the detail at the back of a set of drawings, and more an issue of the builder needing to find the plan or section where the detail is used.
I've run across similar things before where subcontractors will look at a detail and then try to find out where it is being referenced in the plans. They are trying to shortcut an understanding of the overall project by trying to only pay attention to the details that matter to them. They find a tricky detail and then have to figure out where that occurs and drawing sets aren't set up that way to read backwards.
Plan set structure --> General to more and more detailed
One of the architects I worked with once told me that at a high level plans should go from broad to detailed. But a complaint I hear from builders is that they don't like searching for details at way at the end of a set and want details to be located close to where they are referenced. Which is right?
Tell them to stop. Details have a very long and tried way of ordering. They weren't invented yesterday for some contractor's way of reading them. Having said all that, some miscellaneous and special details you might locate near where they are on the plan or other main drawings such as elevations and sections but rarely.
It's not hard to follow a detail reference to it's home a few dozen pages further into the set. It's also not our job to teach the contractor how to read. A well crafted set of drawings will be easy to read regardless of how the details are placed.
One of my favorite (historical) drawing sets is now a hundred years old; about 30 years ago I got to look at an old set of blue lines for as-built info.
On one sheet was a complete floor plan at 1/8". The only other item was a door jamb detail at half-scale, or 6"=1'-0, which took up a not-small corner. Goofy! I figured it was a late addition to the set by someone who didn't want to add a new detail sheet.
Schindler's drawings had details next to plans and were relatively messy and beautiful simultaneously.
I love me some Schindler.
Love it.
Try doing a set the other way…. when the contractor still misses something, they will complain you are structuring your set in a confusing way hahaha.
I have had a couple sets I worked on in locations where it was supposedly more common to do specific combinations of drawings that I found to be a bit atypical. I heard it referred to later by someone as a beaux-arts style drawing (don’t know if that’s historically accurate), where we included plans, sections, axons and even some details for specific portions of a building on single sheets. I personally liked the idea, but disliked the results in both cases, since it didn’t really restructure our whole set, and just threw some weird bloat in the middle in my mind.
One interesting side-effect of running an architecture firm inside and integrated with a real estate and construction company, is that we are no longer constrained by legacy industry conventions and can organize our drawings however we want to (and for maximum convenience to the people doing the building). That hasn't yet resulted in distributing details around onto sheets where they are referenced (plans, sections, elevations), but we have significantly re-organized how we do notation. Our window bugs now include a whole lot of detailed rough opening information which under old-style drawing organization principles would only be in the window schedule. That's the way the framers like it, and it speeds them up considerably. There are a number of other things like that we do as well.
Of course, that wouldn't be possible using old-style drawing production methods (hand or CAD), because of the coordination nightmares. But with BIM all those problems go away immediately.
I'm guessing this is less an issue of the builder needing to find the detail at the back of a set of drawings, and more an issue of the builder needing to find the plan or section where the detail is used.
I've run across similar things before where subcontractors will look at a detail and then try to find out where it is being referenced in the plans. They are trying to shortcut an understanding of the overall project by trying to only pay attention to the details that matter to them. They find a tricky detail and then have to figure out where that occurs and drawing sets aren't set up that way to read backwards.
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