Plans of a level

A level is drawn five ways. Each plan is a drawing of its own, worked out from the model each time it opens, and each one names what it looks at:

• Floor, the floor plan: the level cut at its plan height, the walls cut, the doors with their swings, the windows, the rooms, the stairs and the slabs, with the facades and their openings dimensioned.
• Ceiling, the reflected ceiling plan: the same cut looking up. The rooms are named by their ceiling and its height, a lowered ceiling shows dashed, the beams overhead, the ceiling lights and devices are drawn, and every void in the slab above reads "open above". Nothing that stands on the floor is shown, and doors show their opening, not their leaf.
• Roof, the roof plan: nothing cut. Every roof seen from above, the walls under them dashed, the grids and the section marks, and the roof dimensioned on the south and the west: its eaves, the walls' corners under them, the ridges, and the overall.
• Topography, the plan of the ground and the foundations: the survey with its contours and each reading as a small cross with its figure, and on it the foundations of the level that stands on the ground. It is the same whatever level is open.
• Site, the whole site from above, at 1:200 to begin with: contours every 50 cm with every fifth one labelled, the shadow the building casts for the date and hour of the session's sun, the roofs over it, the natural ground's heights at the building's corners and the north.

The site plan carries the plan tools and the magnet, like the floor plan. The disciplines are not plans of their own: Structural, Electrical, Plumbing, Mechanical and Finishes are overlays laid over any of them (see Overlays).

• Drawing on the floor plan, and checking the ceilings, the lights and the ducts on the ceiling plan.
• Checking the roofs and their dimensions on the roof plan.
• Setting out the terrain and the foundations on the Topography plan.
• Preparing the site plan of a planning application, with its contours and its shadow.

Nothing. Opening a plan, or turning an overlay on or off, changes only what you look at; the overlays are remembered for the project on this computer. Only what you draw on a plan, and a sheet's viewport placed on a sheet, is written to the project.