Units in Drawn Buildings

Overview

Apartment and mixed-use buildings you draw or fill in Build get units: floor plans with a lift and stair core, a corridor, and studios, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments with their rooms, doors, windows and balconies. The Check then measures the inside standards of Clauses 57 and 58 on them, as it does for an uploaded IFC model, and the dwelling schedule, floor plans and downloads work the same way.

The layout is generated, not designed. It shows what fits and how it would fare against the rules, so you can test a building's size and mix before an architect draws it. You can then edit any unit, or bring in your own plan. Houses and townhouses don't get units: Clause 55 doesn't check rooms.

How It's Laid Out

1. The plate: the building's footprint, as a rectangle, on every floor. If the footprint isn't close to a rectangle, only the units that fit inside it are kept.
2. The core: a lift and one stair, or two stairs when the top floor is more than 25 m up. It follows the National Construction Code's rules on exits only as an indication: it isn't a building-code check.
3. The corridor:
   • plates 18 m or deeper get units on both sides of a 1.6 m corridor, with the core on the side facing further from north;
   • shallower plates get units on the northern side of an open gallery, so every unit has openings both ways.
4. The units fill each façade, the widest at the ends. Units at the ends of the plate get windows on the end wall too, which is what cross-ventilates them.
5. The floors:
   • mixed-use types keep shops or offices on their lowest floors;
   • apartment ground floors get gardens in front (25 m², 3 m deep for Clause 58) instead of balconies.

Each unit type meets the inside standards on its own:

• bedrooms 3.0 × 3.4 m (main) and 3.0 × 3.0 m, with room for a wardrobe;
• an open-plan living, kitchen and dining room at least 3.3 m wide (3.6 m with two or more bedrooms), no deeper than 2.5 × the 2.7 m ceiling from its window;
• a balcony from Table D8 or E3-4;
• the full storage of Table D10 or E3-10 inside the apartment;
• an 850 mm clear entrance and main bedroom door, a 1.2 m hall, and a bathroom laid out to Table D7 Design A, so that it can meet the accessibility standard where the plan has room.

The Mix

The units aim for a mix of studios, 1, 2 and 3 bedrooms. By default it's the mix of the City of Melbourne's completed developments within 1.5 km of the building, from the City's Development Activity Monitor. Where there aren't enough nearby, it's the whole City's mix since 2016 (about 2% studios, 39% 1 bed, 51% 2 bed, 8% 3 bed). There's no Victoria-wide count of new apartments by bedrooms yet, so outside the City this is labelled as the City's.

A floor rarely fits the mix exactly. The layout weighs more homes against keeping close to the mix, and where a façade has room left over it adds a unit or makes one a size bigger.

In Build

Select an apartment or mixed-use building. Under Units:

• the homes, units per floor, corridor and core, and the homes of each type;
• a typical floor, north up, with walls, door swings and windows, each unit coloured by type. Pick a unit to change its type on every floor (a bigger type only where the façade is long enough), edit its plan or bring in a plan file;
• Download this floor as a PDF, DXF or SVG, with furniture on its own layer;
• Corridor: by the plate's depth, between units, or an open gallery;
• Mix: change it, or go back to the City's.

When you resize a building or change its storeys, its units are made again and its homes counted from them. Buildings placed before units existed say how many homes their units make, with a button to count them.

What Else You Can Do With a Unit

Pick a unit under Units to:

• Edit its plan, bring in a plan file, or download a floor as PDF, DXF or SVG;
• see its sun and outlook, floor by floor;
• walk through it;
• make sales sheets for the building's homes, with illustrative pictures.

In the Check

The inside standards, the dwelling schedule and the floor plans read the generated or edited rooms. Each finding says it comes from the generated layout.

Accessibility (Standards D18 and E3-11, at least 50% of dwellings) is measured where a plan has doors:

• an 850 mm clear opening at the entrance and main bedroom (a door's leaf less 70 mm, unless the clear width is known);
• a 1.2 m clear path from the entrance to the main bedroom, an adaptable bathroom and the living area, through the doors;
• a bathroom to Table D7 Design A: an 850 mm door, a hobless shower, and a 1.2 × 1.2 m circulation area in front of the shower and toilet, clear of the fixtures.

Not measured: Design B, Design A's 900 mm path from the door, whether a toilet's in the corner, and door swings. A bathroom that could only meet Design B reads as not meeting it: say so in your application if it does.

For an uploaded IFC model, door widths come from its IfcDoors where it states them, and doors are linked to the rooms beside them. Models rarely have bathroom fixtures as such, so accessibility there usually stays to be confirmed, and says why.

Long double-loaded floors often fail cross ventilation (40% of dwellings must be). That's a real result: a long corridor with apartments on both sides leaves most of them facing one way.

Sources