By Design: Breaking Up Boxiness

A buildings in school by creating something called “bubble diagrams” — essentially little circles arranged to show which rooms should touch each other. In many cases, these crude scribbles are simply dressed up in the form of a floor plan and handed over to a client with little further ado. That’s understandable, because most people can’t visualize a three-dimensional space from a floor plan. Too often, though, this approach results in a plan consisting of isolated “boxes of space” with no sense of flow between them — little more than a freight train of rooms bumped up against one another (see Figure 1). Sight Lines in New Homes To create that sense of flow, it’s essential to link separate