Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Floor Naming and Numbering

This is a little abstract one, but if you look at those elevator buttons, whether you’re in a building in San Francisco and you come in on the east side of the building and it’s Floor Level One; you come in on the west side of the building and the road slopes, and you’re now in B- 2.

So how do you know what floor you’re really on? How do you orient yourself within that building? We have no system that says, “Here’s how to number a building.” There are certain conventional standards, but there’s nothing that says, “This is the best-practices way to do it.” And you could confuse people between M for Main, L for Lobby, 1 for first floor. Well, in some cases, you’re -- for example, one is actually the second level above ground. How do you name them? How do you number them?

The numbering system, too, when you’re looking at a plan, an architectural drawing -- I’ve been part of projects where they’ve laid a grid over the floor plan, and the upper left corner is one and the lower right corner is 100, and we do a left to right down the grid. And that’s how they number buildings.

Comment by [Participant]: In defense of architects, that should change when the signage comes through, to be logical.

Response by Erin Schambureck: I hope so. It’s meant to be for the mechanical systems and labeling those into the AC systems and [other construction coordination]

Comment by [Participant]: It should never be the numbering system afterwards.

Response by Erin Schambureck: But it gets done. So looking more intuitively at how we number a building, can we come up with a better process for that?