How do you draw floor plans to scale? What even is scale in architectural drawings? Let’s find out why architects need to draw floor plans to scale and how you can too. This is the second video of the Floor Plans Course for Architecture Students. We ‘re talking scale in architectural floor plans. Watch episode 1: What is a Floor Plan?: Check out the blog post on my site: Get access to your FREE online course for architecture students: ▼ 70 Hacks for Architecture Students▼ → ← How to Read and Draw a Scaled Floor Plan – Architectural scale isn’t easy to wrap your head around, so stick with me, and let’s break it down. G’day and Welcome, In the last video of this Architectural Drawing Course, we started looking at floor plans. That 4-minute video walked through what a floor plan actually is and how to draw your own floor plans. If you haven’t seen that, I recommend watching it as that is the first video of this course and you don’t want to get left behind as we move forward. That video exp lained architectural floor plans, generally what they look like and how you can produce one. But It brought up the idea of ​​drawing to scale. So, what does this actually mean? Let’s take for example, you are asked to draw this 45cm or 18in ruler on paper, if you were drawing it at its normal scale you would draw it 45cm or 18 inches long as that is an accurate representation of it at its original scale. Now that would be fine to do, as it fits on a page quite nicely. But can you imagine trying to draw a house plan on a piece of paper at its original scale? You would need a lot of paper. Drawing to scale generally means drawing something with accurate sizes but in a shrunken version that is, scaled down , or an enlarged version that is scaled up. In architectural drawing, we really only look at scaling things down. Because, if we draw a piece of furniture, we want to be able to show that piece of furniture, typically on a piece of paper to show a builder or client. Therefore, you wouldn’t want to enlarge the thing, you would want to scale it down to fit it on that piece of paper. That is what scale is all about. It’s about drawing that piece of furniture accurately, but just making it smaller so that you can fit it on a page. You might have seen this scale indicator before, whether it be 1:1, 1:100 or 1:67. What this means for us in this drawing is that anything in the drawing with the size of 1 would have a size in real life of 1. It is a scale ratio of 1:1. For every 1mm on the drawing, it represents 1mm in real life. So, what would it mean to draw in 1:100 or 1:500? Drawing at a scale of 1:100 would mean that for every 1mm in the drawing, it represents 100mm in real life. Drawing at a scale of 1:500 would mean that for every 1mm in the drawing, it represents 500mm in real life. You might have noticed that as the scale number gets larger, the drawing gets smaller. 1:500 was the smallest drawing. 1:1000 would be half that. That’s because really, what this scale is tel ling us is that at 1:100, the drawing of the thing is 100x smaller than its real-life size. At 1:500, the drawing is 500x smaller than the real-life size. As the number goes up, the drawing size gets smaller. So, let’s say we want to draw a house floor plan on a piece of paper. How do we know what scale to shrink it down to? To draw something to scale, it needs to be accurately represented at a smaller size. You would first need to know the dimensions of the house. Whether it be an existing house you are drawing up, or a design you’re creating yourself. More importantly, from one point of the house to the other, how long or tall is the footprint of the building? If the house is 20mx40m, you can scale this down to put it on a piece of paper. For example, I want to draw this 20×40 house on an a4 piece of paper. To do that, I’ve chosen the scale out of the air of 1:100. The drawing will be 100x smaller than the house is in real life. To work out that size, we need to know what 20m divided by 100 is. Therefore, the length of the house on a piece of paper would be 0.2m. Or 20cm. 40m divided by 100 is therefore 40cm. To draw this floor plan at a scale of 1:100, you therefore need to draw 20cmx40cm. Now notice how easy it was to divide that number by 100. This is why you always see architects working in scales such as 1:10, 1:50, 1:100, 1:200, 1:500 and not 1: 67, 1:300, 1:750. I often see architecture students do this and it’s just not good practice. Make it easier for yourself and those reading the plan by drawing to a simple scale that can easily be worked out..