It is seldom mentioned in conjunction with landscape design however. It is also used in other design disciplines. The concept of parti is common in architecture. A parti is usually a sketch, diagram, drawing, doodle, or some other graphic that represents the direction, concept, or theme of a design. Again you should make sure that your functional diagram carries forward the adjacencies and other relationships expressed in the bubble diagram.Ī concept that I have been intending to write about for some time is “parti”. The next most likely step is to create functional diagrams. You might do an overlay of your bubble diagram over various form compositions. The same applies going on to subsequent steps. You should use the space adjacency analysis to check off or validate that you have address every space and every adjacency and non-adjacency. As stated above, the bubble diagram is usually based on the space adjacency analysis. As such you should validate you input into it’s creation and the output from how you use it. Second, the bubble diagram is a design and analysis tool. It does not mean that your design implementation will follow those rules. These constraints are intended to make sure your bubble diagram makes sense logically and that the spaces flow or connect in a consistent manner.

No line should cross another line or another bubble. For example, no bubbles should touch or overlap. First, there are a lot of “rules” dictating how bubble diagrams should be drawn. With all of the potential benefits of bubble diagrams it is important to keep a couple of things in mind. It can also be useful if you are going to show the bubble diagram to the client for clarification or feedback. This technique simply provides an additional layer of visual detail to help with your analysis of how the space will function together as a cohesive whole. I have mentioned another technique in a previous post where you place a graphic such as a picture or drawing inside each bubble to represent what is actually going to be inside that space. You just have to remember that the actual space layout is not likely to be a circle. As mentioned previously making the bubble sizes larger or smaller to show the amount of relative space each will require is useful. This will give you some preliminary ideas about how the spaces will actually fit into the area you have to work with. You can draw them on top of a copy of the base plan. There are other things you can do with a bubble diagram to make it more useful. Seeing the spacing represented as bubbles may help you to think through the relationships between spaces and make decisions as to how strong or weak the adjacency should be. Sometimes in may be useful to actually sketch out a bubble diagram to help think through the space adjacency analysis. Dark, heavy lines represent close or high adjacency, dashed lines may represent some adjacency, and no line obviously represents a lack of adjacency. The lines connecting those bubbles or the lack of lines are the depiction of the results of the space adjacency analysis. There should be one bubble for each space listed on the adjacency analysis. They can also be useful for ideation.Īs a general rule, bubble diagrams are created after space adjacency analysis. We can use them to help us understand aspects of the design problem we are trying to solve without investing huge amounts of time with complex and detailed drawings. They are a visual tool for representation. They help us understand space adjacency, layouts, and relationships, traffic flows, and relative space sizes among other things.

Bubble diagrams are a useful design and analysis tool.

Program bubble diagram architecture