The Plans

Building the robotics required to automate construction is likely trillions of dollars of capital investment. In the meantime, closer to earth is an opportunity to understand the nature of drawings, how to make them better, and cleaner, so that we humans might communicate to one another more cleanly.

My personal design philosophy centered around automation is: generate using a system, then edit using a system that can regenerate a completely different object from base underlying data. Essentially, the app needs to learn from the user in realtime preferences and choices. This only happens with an app intelligent enough to learn. This doesn’t mean LLMs for AEC, in my mind, it simply means structured geometry and structured parameters linked together.

Put plainly: a drawing should be an output, not a record. Store the relationships behind the lines (which two rooms a wall separates, what a height is measured from, how far a drawer sweeps, what a sheet has to fit) and the drawing can be regenerated every time the design changes. Store only the lines, which is all an elemental system like CAD or BIM records, and every change is a redraw. The posts that test this one drawing at a time are laid out in reading order after the list below.

The task is tall, but the reward a delight: design democratization to all that want it, and a tool so powerful only 1% of its users will ever completely leverage 100% of it (looking to you Revit or OpenAI). Here is my starting shopping list…

The shopping list

Plans are the things that are diagrammatic representations of a finished built product. Plans come in five major flavors:

1. Civil Engineering
2. Architectural Design
3. Structural Engineering
4. Mechanical Engineering
5. Electrical Engineering

Starting with the dirt and working our way up….
Civil Engineering

1. Existing Conditions Plan – shows all the buildings, important roads, and specifies the phase of construction’s location
2. Demolition Plan – if demo is necessary, this plan will indicate where to raze building
3. Grading Plan – where is all the dirt gonna move, and how is the water going to leave
4. Traffic Plan – where are vehicles coming from, where will they wait in a stacker, and how will they exit
5. Utility Plan – locate the water supply, waste water, electricity, and active drainage measures
6. Sewer Plan – locate the manholes and water discharge system

Architectural Design

1. Site Plan – locate and scale the building to be built correctly on site, along with how sidewalks or parking facilities interact with the building
2. Floor Plan – describe the dimensions of interior rooms, their doors, walls, and windows, casework and additional built-in furniture
3. Roof Plan – dimensions of the roof, its skylights, slopes, and drainage directions
4. Reflected Ceiling Plan – interior lighting and hvac equipment placement coordination
5. Finish Plan – locate, dimension, and scale the different materials used on floors

Structural Engineering

1. Foundation Plan – locate the piers, grade beams and extent of poured slabs
2. Framing Plan – column/ beam/ girder sizing and locating
3. Roof Framing Plan – Like the framing plan but for the roof, often filled with prefabricated systems for roof framing (commercial buildings)

Mechanical Engineering

1. Mechanical Plan – Elevators and escalators
2. HVAC Plan – Locate and size ducting for air conditioning

Electrical Engineering

1. Electrical Plan – Locate and size transformers, switchgears, and sub-metering closets

The reading path

The list is the scope; nobody starts with all of it. The series starts where the thesis is cheapest to test: the sheet a drawing lands on, then the rooms of the architectural floor plan, then the walls, doors and stairs between those rooms, and last the site plan the building has to share with its cars and its water. Read in this order, each post hands its open question to the next.

The drawing

What a drawing is before anyone builds a room: a view placed on a sheet, and heights and openings that mean something only because of what they hang from.

1. Paper Space I – Your model lives at full size and your client sees a sheet; for one drawing on one sheet, scale and orientation should be computed from the geometry, not asked for.
2. Paper Space II – A set is many views of one model that keeps changing, so a sheetset should save each view’s conditions and regenerate its scale whenever the geometry or project north moves.
3. Paper Space III – Prices that decision: five sheet sizes against five scales, where a scale step is a factor of four, a sheet size about two, and turning the sheet can be worth a whole scale step.
4. Elevation I – A 52-inch light switch is a promise about what it is measured from; every height on a wall hangs from the floor, the ceiling or another object, and that parent decides what moves when the room changes.
5. Elevation II – Takes the same rule to a whole facade and adds sideways: every opening is a sill above grade and an offset from the corner, and a wall described as symmetric turns out to be 1.5 feet off its centerline.

The room

A room written down as requirements, then arranged, then cleared, then serviced, then pinned to a wall, then multiplied into more options than anyone can look at.

1. Generic Room Configurator I – Write down what a room must hold as numbers before arranging anything: a fridge, sink, range and three 18-inch casework runs need 144 inches, and a shorter wall is not a smaller kitchen, it is a failed one.
2. Generic Room Configurator II – Wrap the same kitchen around an inside corner and the requirement list stays put, while the order of placement starts deciding which appliance meets the corner.
3. Furniture Clearance Configurator – Splits clearance into footprint, walking envelope and opening envelope; store only footprints and every room comes out undersized.
4. Room Based BIM I – Starts with the room instead of the wall and lets each object bring its own service points, so a sink arrives already asking for water and a drain.
5. Kitchen Generator I – The first room where the furniture can’t move: on one 12-foot wall run the appliances are requirements, the casework is the slack, and the range is the only appliance with forbidden neighbors.
6. Kitchen Generator II – The slack turns out to be the hard part: one cabinet front makes 36 combinations before width, nothing rules any of them out, and the real job becomes deciding which differences a person should ever see.
7. Kitchen Generator III – Brute force answers “what fits”: one 17-foot wall has 281,064 exact layouts, and the useful job is showing the few that are actually different.

The graph under the room

The walls, doors and stairs the rooms leave behind, stored as relationships instead of lines.

1. #27 · Walls as Edges – A wall is an edge between two room nodes; store the pair, not just the line, and the plan knows who touches whom, where a door can go and which code rules fire.
2. #31 · Walls Between Cells – The same wall as the physical thing two rooms share and neither owns: the pair on either side sets its rating, acoustics and thickness, so a change on one side lands on the neighbor.
3. #45 · Fire Ratings at Edges – A wall’s fire rating comes from the pair of rooms on either side; move the stair and the rated footage stays the same while the 2-hour wall lands on a different side.
4. #33 · Doors as Edges – A shared wall makes a door possible and the door makes two rooms connected, so choosing doors decides how long the routes are, which rooms turn into corridors and whether one closed door cuts a room off.
5. #41 · Egress as a Graph – Travel distance is the length of a route through the doors, not a ruler line: 89 feet walked against 76.3 straight, and block one corridor segment and the route is gone while the line stays put.
6. #36 · Stairs Connect Floors – A stair is a chain of edges from a floor down to grade, so two stairs in one shaft can be one way down: the schedule still says two, and one break strands the top floors.

Out to the site

Where the stairs come out: the ground the building shares with the water and the cars, budgeted before the building is drawn.

1. #23 · Site and Stormwater – Every square foot of roof and paving makes water, and the basin it needs takes land before the building gets any.
2. #19 · Parking Drives Sites – On one 200,000 SF site, the choice between one parking level and two is roughly the choice between 260 homes and 400, and no floor plan recovers that later.

What the path adds up to

Every stop on that path finds the same thing. The fact a drawing keeps (a scale, a height, a footprint, an appliance width, a line) is never the decision. The decision is the relationship behind it: what the sheet has to fit, what the height hangs from, what a drawer sweeps into, what the casework gives up, which two rooms the wall keeps apart. A tool that stores the relationship can regenerate the drawing when the design moves. A tool that stores only the drawing can be redrawn, and nothing more. That is the bar for the app I want, and it is why my shopping list starts with plans rather than robots.

Start with Paper Space I.