Learn about Reflected Ceiling Plans (RCPs), an essential part of architectural and construction planning. This article explains the details of an RCP drawn for a hotel's public spaces, including symbols, legends, and how to read and understand the specifics of ceiling details.
Key Insights
- RCPs allow architects and builders to view information about the ceiling as if reflected from the floor, detailing ceiling types, heights, and individual room details.
- Specific features such as lighting fixtures, junction boxes, and partitioning are represented through symbols in the plan, providing comprehensive information about the space and its fixtures.
- These plans often contain references to enlarged plans for further detail, and while dimensions may not be abundant at this level, more detailed information can be found in the enlarged versions.
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Let's look at our next plan drawing. This drawing is called an RCP, which stands for Reflected Ceiling Plan. From a broad view, you can see that this is the Reflected Ceiling Plan drawing set for the public areas.
You'll notice that there are guest spaces along the perimeter of the building, and those spaces are not detailed. All of the detailing is happening within the public and lobby spaces. A Reflected Ceiling Plan is looking at the information on the ceiling, and it's essentially, imagine having mirrors on the floor of a building that are then reflecting from the ceiling what you see.
So it's a Reflected Ceiling Plan. We see right here, we have the sheet name and number. Over here, sheet name and number.
We also have the scale of the drawing. If we go into this area, we see the Reflected Ceiling Plan legend. We're going to see that it's going to say the ceiling type and the height above the finished floor.
We have the labels A, B, B1, and so on and so forth. We see that some are exposed concrete, texture coated, suspended, gyp board painting, and the list goes on. So for example, in this room, right over here, we see that it's a D2, which is a washable finished material, and the height is eight feet.
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If we look in this room over here, let's just zoom in a little bit more. We see that it's a coffered ceiling. So it's 12 foot four at the top.
It's eight and a half inches. Below this panel right here, if I look at the perimeter up here, I can see that this area is at nine feet. The materials are W01, which is tongue and groove planks on plywood.
I'm just going to pan down. We have the symbols listing. You can see that there's fluorescent light fixtures.
So these are all fluorescent light fixtures. We have junction boxes for ceiling mounted fixtures, for wall mounted fixtures. We have wall mounted fixtures, which would probably be sconces, chandeliers, surface mounted fixtures, and the list goes on.
So the nice thing is that when we look at the drawing, like right here, I can see that I would be using this recessed downlight fixture in that position. Again, in the drawing, we have part A and part B of the hotel. We're focusing on part B. The information is here, and you can see that it's relatively clearly conveyed.
There are going to be enlarged plans. So this area here will be referenced on page A455. It's image one.
You can see we have the structural grids. There really are typically not a whole lot of dimensions on reflected ceiling plans at this level of detail. We will find more detailed information in the enlarged plans.
You can see, looking here, see the dashed lines in this little pocket closet here? This is just showing me that these are going to be movable partitions that can break this room into multiple venues for people to enjoy their time at the hotel. So again, reflected ceiling plan for the public spaces. We have the legends.
We have the symbols, and we will have references to enlarged plans.