Life Safety Plans – Using AREA Plans
Life Safety Plans are an essential part of most project Construction Document sets, and here are a couple Tips that will get you doing down the right path.. before your get stuck in a dead-end corridor!
Use AREA PLANS to create your Life Safety views. I had a great conversation recently with some colleagues and they brought out some very important issues which I will relay here.
AREAS on AREA PLANS calculate the square footage properly using ‘rules’ for area square footage takeoffs. When using ‘Rentable Area’ for the plan template, Revit automatically calculates to the interior of Exterior walls and to the center of interior walls. Revit also does not take into consideration the walls that fall fully within the Area. These calculations follow the Life Safety requirements for square footage calculations.
Another great idea surfaced: For a quick visual, to make sure that all areas are accounted for, you can make an Area Color Scheme that turns each of the different Area Types (or other parameter) a color.. so a Project Manager can have a quick visual check to see if every space is being calculated in the schedules.
Typical Floor plans using ROOMS in lieu of AREAS can be used at your own risk. Here is why: ROOMS calculate to the face of stud or face of finish (user defined).. but don’t have the same square footage ‘rules’ used by AREA plans. And for many Life Safely Plans, you must add smaller areas within areas to designate specific needs. EXAMPLE: The UN-Concentrated Seating Areas within Circulation Zones. These can be delineated with an Area Boudary.. but using ROOM separation lines will create new ROOMS that can truly mess up the ROOM and FINISH schedules.
One of the visual hurdles is adding a different ‘PATTERN’ to the AREAS to represent the different AREA designations. It would have been quite easy to simply add different colors.. but this obviously would not print correctly in the typical black/white sets.
So before you head down a path that could cause you countless hours of frustration.. consider creating your Life Safety Plans using AREA PLANS.