Design Procedures

Innovative procedures were used in the drafting and printing procedures for the building plans, and for the text and graphic procedures for this website.

The objective of this site

Leonard Azar

This website is intended to promote the construction of compact buildings with efficient floor plans that provide affordable and livable homes. The buildings on this website, and the site itself, were designed by Leonard Azar, a retired electrical engineer. Engineers believe that form follows function, which explains why the homes are not designed to a traditional style and why the site is not "cool".

The website has been designed for fast loading, easy navigation, and good legibility. I have also attempted, by using just simple HTML and a simple style sheet, to make the site appear almost the same to the vast majority of visitors, independent of the browser used or the display size.

My other website is Long Term Investing.

Drafting procedures

The computer-aided-drafting (CAD) program used was an engineering program, not an architectural program. Using a non-architectural program eliminates the constraints imposed by the legacy of architectural design. In fact, it makes it necessary to re-invent architectural drafting.

For example, it was found that designing on a 3-inch grid is superior to designing on the traditional 4-inch grid. For one thing, kitchen and bathroom cabinet sizes are multiples of 3 inches, so it becomes possible to do a better job of kitchen and bathroom design. And it becomes possible to distinguish 6-inch walls and double 4-inch walls by drawing them two increments wide, and drawing single 4-inch walls one increment wide.

It was also found that the standard symbols used in architectural CAD programs are inadequate. For example, it is not possible to distinguish a wall phone jack from a desk phone jack, because the symbols are the same. Similarly, it is not possible to distinguish an antenna television jack from a cable television jack, or a floor heat register from a ceiling heat register. Furthermore, the standard symbols print badly because they have too much detail. It is not necessary to show faucets on a bathtub or burners on a range. To overcome these problems, I created my own libraries of symbols that provide more information than standard symbols, yet print more clearly.

Printing

Printing of building plans is traditionally done with a plotter, which uses pen and ink to produce an original drawing. Copies are then made from the original, and it is these copies that are provided to the customer.

This procedure has problems. The customer can only guess at how many sets of plans will be needed, but dare not order too few because it is illegal to copy prints without permission. The building department might require letter-size elevations and floor plans as part of the approval process -- the reduced prints would have poor legibility because of the reduction of line thickness. And the prints cannot be modified because the lines cannot be erased.

I circumvent these problems by designing half-size drawings that can be printed with any printer capable of handling letter and legal size paper. These originals need no or very little reduction to make letter-size copies. The originals can be enlarged to full size on bond paper, or they can be enlarged on vellum to facilitate erasures.

  SIZE      ORIGINAL, inches          FULL SIZE, inches
   1        8.5 x 11 (letter)         17 x 22 (C)
   2        8.5 x 14 (legal)          17 x 28 (irregular)
   3       11.0 x 17 (two letter)     22 x 34 (D)

Size 3 is two letter-size tiles rather than ledger size, because very few printers will accept ledger paper. After printing, the tiles can be taped together to produce the original.

Website design

Appearance

Page content is displayed inside a single-celled table that makes it possible to center the content on the screen and contrast the content background color with the screen background color. For most pages the table is 620 pixels wide, so that no horizontal scrolling is required even if the display is set to a width of only 640 pixels. Some pages are wider to accommodate larger graphics.

Text

Pages were sometimes created from scratch, but usually were created by copying and editing an existing page with the word processor or the text editor that came with the operating system. These utilities have limited editing capabilities but, unlike full featured word processors, can save a document as a text file without changing the filename extension.

After a page was created, a full featured word processor was used to check grammar and spelling and to help in the selection of words.

Identical changes on multiple pages, such as correcting a systematic error or changing the mailing address, were made with a freeware utility that can make identical text changes in all the files of a folder.

Images

Images were creating by copying CAD drawings, pasting them into bitmap templates, and editing them with the paint program that came with the operating system.

Floor plans and site plans used blank templates. The template used for elevations had boxes of colors at the bottom. The color boxes were trimmed off after coloring was completed.

All bitmap graphics were compressed into GIF format with a shareware utility, to make them compatible with Web browsers.

Leonard Azar, 309 Oxford Street, Brookings, OR 97415, (541) 469-2429, e-mail.