Adjacency Rules

Adjacency is a powerful way to describe how rooms relate. A plan can mark which spaces should connect, which should remain apart and which relationships are preferred. That gives the design team a clear starting point before settling on exact dimensions or geometry.

Adjacency matrix and plan

Six equal rooms on a 3 × 2 grid; adjacency means a shared side, not a corner. The solver tries all 720 arrangements and keeps the highest score, breaking ties by room order. Required pairs score +3 when touching and −3 when not, avoid pairs +2 and −2, preferred pairs +1 and −1. Open plan puts entry, living, kitchen, dining and bed in one room with the bath off it, so every pair touches. Hold layout freezes the plan solved for the bath–kitchen avoid example. Room size, doors, daylight and circulation are not modelled.

Take a small home with six rooms: entry, living, kitchen, dining, bath and bedroom. Two required pairs, entry beside living and bath beside bedroom, plus a preferred living–kitchen pair, fit on a 3 × 2 grid. 2 of 2 required adjacencies are satisfied, 0 conflicts, score 7.

Add one rule: kitchen and dining required. A kitchen may work better beside dining space, and here the rooms still fit. 3 of 3 required adjacencies are satisfied, 0 conflicts, score 10.

Add a bath–kitchen avoid. An avoid is a rule too, and the solver counts it. The rooms move, 3 of 3 required adjacencies stay satisfied, 0 conflicts, score 12.

Now ask too much of the living room. Entry, kitchen, dining and bedroom are all required beside it, and a room on this grid has at most 3 neighbors. 5 of 6 required adjacencies are satisfied, 1 conflict (living–dining), score 14. No arrangement on this grid satisfies all 4, so a rule has to change.

A studio removes the conflict by removing the walls. In the open plan all 6 required adjacencies hold, but the bath–kitchen avoid breaks: 1 conflict, score 16. Rooms that share one volume cannot be kept apart.

A built plan is a fixed answer to the rules of the day. Hold the layout solved for the bath–kitchen avoid and add one more rule, entry–dining required: 3 of 4 required adjacencies are satisfied, 1 conflict, score 9. Solving again would score 15, but a built plan cannot be solved again.

These are design intentions to test against the users, project brief and site, not universal rules that make a plan compliant or marketable by themselves. The scores come from the weights stated under the drawing, not from any standard.

Adjacency diagrams leave important questions unanswered: room size, daylight, structure, accessibility, services and egress still shape the plan. The diagram helps organize those constraints; it does not replace them. Its value is in making spatial priorities visible early enough to compare alternatives.