Feng Shui Design House Plans
What are floor plans?
Floor plans are scale drawings that show the relationship between rooms, spaces and physical features viewed from above. They provide a way to visualize how people will move through the space. Floor plans makes it easier to check if the space is suitable for its intended purpose, work through any potential challenges and redesign before moving forward into more elaborate planning or building stages. It can be fun, too, to experiment with different design alternatives and circulation flows, which show how people move through the space.
Noted architect Jean Nouvel said, “Space, space: architects always talk about space! But creating a space is not automatically doing architecture. With the same space, you can make a masterpiece or cause a disaster.” That’s why from Tiny Houses to making a convention flow smoothly for attendees, a floor plan is the place to begin creating and diagramming a logical space based on end user requirements.
Floor plans vs building plans
Floor plans show the big picture of living, work, and outdoor spaces. Although they should be scale drawings, floor plans don’t hold enough information for builders to actually construct a home or other structure. Instead, a floor plan is essentially a simple diagram showing room layout and offering a conceptual starting point. A builder needs complete blueprints, or construction-ready drawings, with technical information that you will not find on most floor plans.
Space planning and circulation in new and existing environments
Space planning is important in new structures, but it’s also important in rethinking existing spaces to determine how to use them more efficiently. Space planning has come into demand as a discrete service by architectural firms for many reasons: high-rise office space with unfinished interiors, the fast pace of organizational growth thanks to technological shifts, downsizing and reorganizing. You can learn more about it in Space Planning, published by the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
Circulation and traffic flow
In any space where people live, work, shop, or gather, the arrangement within rooms and the flow from one space to another make a difference in the feel and utility of the environment. Good circulation and traffic flow depend on what space is being planned—for example, in a retail space, you may want to direct the way visitors move through a space, and in an art gallery, you may want traffic to be less restrictive to prevent bottle necks. Depending on the way square footage is divided, interiors of the same size can feel very different depending on sightlines (a sightline is the theoretical line-of-sight of an observer to an object or area being viewed). As a rule of thumb, the fewer visual obstructions there are in a space, the larger it will appear to be.
Flow and Feng Shui
The idea of flow doesn’t simply apply to the physical movement of people through space. Feng Shui, or the art and science of creating a harmonious environment, has been in use for over 5, 000 years to arrange private and public spaces. Today, Feng Shui practitioners all over the world use scaled floor plans to design new structures or rearrange existing environments to correspond to the strict rules of the ancient practice. For examples, the world’s newest Disney theme park in Shanghai, has been built after consultation with Feng Shui masters. You can learn more by reading Feng Shui Principals for Building and Remodeling in this best practices article published by the AIA.
