Elevations

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As well as site and floor plans, there are several other types of diagrams you’re likely to see to support the design of a new house. These all help to ensure that the house is built correctly, and to communicate the architect or building designer’s ideas, intentions, and detail. Among others, these plans include elevations, framing plans, wall sections and shadow diagrams.

What are elevations?
Elevations are diagrams that depict – to scale and in detail – how a particular side of the building will look. For example, an elevation might be a detailed drawing of the front of the house, showing how it’d look from the street, complete with windows, cladding, doors, shrubbery and so forth. Elevation diagrams may also use some colour and texture to give a clearer picture of how the house is supposed to look.

Elevations are also used to provide a detailed view of certain facets of an interior too (for example, a cut-out of a kitchen) – particularly to demonstrate how fixtures, doors, cabinets, and the like will be laid out.

These types of diagrams are drawn by marking out parallel and perpendicular lines from key feature points on a given side of a floor plan that are likely to be visible from the side of the building that’s being drawn (e.g. corners, outside stairs, doors, windows, chimneys etc), and then diagramming in a flat side view using these lines.