Key plans and tiles

@@ -11,46 +11,45 @@ status: active
audience: customer-woodfine
bcsc_class: current-fact
language_protocol: PROSE-TOPIC
last_edited: 2026-08-24
last_edited: 2026-09-08
editor: pointsav-engineering
short_description: "A geometric, self-similar space planning system derived from tenant equipment and circulation geometry, used to derive fixed floor plate dimensions."
short_description: "The nested Key Plan, Tile, and Floor Plate hierarchy Woodfine designs from — space planned from real furniture and circulation outward, rather than from a floor-plate area formula inward."
paired_with: building-design/key-plans-and-tiles.es.md
---

Key Plans and Tiles is the space planning methodology that translates professional occupier equipment and circulation requirements into standardized geometric units, which are then aggregated to produce the [[fixed-floor-plates|fixed floor plate]] dimensions. The system is geometric and self-similar: a single tile unit — derived from the physical footprint of workstation equipment, furniture arrangement, and minimum circulation path — generates the full range of floor plate configurations through repetition and aggregation rather than custom design.
Every Woodfine Building is planned from the furniture out, not from a floor-plate area formula in. A leasehold arrives with its light, circulation, and ventilation already proven at three nested scales — the Key Plan, the Tile, and the Floor Plate — so no building is sized larger than the accommodation it was designed to hold.

## From equipment geometry to tile
## The Key Plan

The base tile is derived by measuring the physical geometry of the primary equipment configuration for each [[mix-of-use|professional tenant category]]:
The Key Plan is the smallest unit of space worth leasing: a room-scale plan sized from real furniture placement, real circulation, and real daylight access, rather than from a generic area-per-person allowance. Most Key Plans resolve into three zones moving in from the building face — a daylight zone where desks or workstations sit within reach of natural light, a flexible interior zone used for storage or depth that varies by tenant category, and a circulation zone. Private Office Key Plans are the one documented exception: they carry no separate circulation zone of their own, opening directly onto the building's shared corridor instead. Key Plan sizes vary by professional tenant category — private office, laboratory, medical, academic, business, and civic space each have their own range, from single-office suites up to large civic assemblies.

- The workstation or treatment area footprint
- The circulation clearance required on each side (typically governed by the German Circulation Law 3-foot minimum or equivalent)
- The secondary adjacency — filing, storage, or equipment — that must be within the workstation's immediate zone
## The Tile

This measurement produces a rectangular unit of defined dimensions. The tile is the smallest self-contained space unit that can accommodate the equipment geometry plus required circulation. All further space planning is done by aggregating tiles, not by designing from scratch.
Key Plans combine into Tiles. A Tile is a block of Key Plans that does double duty: it is the unit a tenant actually leases, and it is the single climate-services zone the building's mechanical systems are sized to — every Key Plan sharing a Tile shares that Tile's own heating, cooling, and ventilation zone. Not every Key Plan fits every Tile; at building corners and around elevator lobbies, smaller purpose-built configurations fill space that a standard Tile would not fit efficiently. Two development classes — Retail Select and Tech Industrial — skip the Tile level entirely: Key Plans in those classes compose directly into Floor Plates.

## The self-similar and aperiodic character
## The Floor Plate

Key Plans are geometric, self-similar, and aperiodic — the tile repeats to fill a floor plate area, but the repetition produces a non-periodic pattern. This means no two adjacent tiles have identical orientation to every neighbour; the floor plate geometry avoids the monotony of orthogonal grid repetition while remaining fully derivable from the base tile.
The Floor Plate is the [[fixed-floor-plates|fixed floor plate]] a Woodfine Building's structural grid is built around: Tiles plus the building's core — the shared elevator lobbies, stairs, mechanical rooms, and washrooms every Floor Plate carries regardless of tenant mix.

This aperiodic property has practical consequences for space flexibility. A tenant requiring a different use-case configuration — a laboratory bench arrangement versus a medical treatment room versus a business workstation cluster — can be accommodated by reorienting the tiles within the plate boundary, not by reconfiguring structural elements.
## Nesting Without Remainder

## Tiles and floor plate subdivisions
Key Plans nest into Tiles, and Tiles nest into Floor Plates, without leaving unaccounted space at any level — but not by simple addition. Where a clean sum would leave a gap or an overhang, smaller purpose-built configurations absorb the difference, the same way Special Tiles absorb the odd geometry at a building corner. A prospective tenant is selecting from a defined set of geometrically complete configurations at every scale, not requesting a custom partition arrangement after the fact.

The tile unit defines the minimum leasable module. Floor plate subdivisions — 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and full floor — are each multiples of the tile unit: a subdivision boundary falls at a tile boundary, not at an arbitrary point on the floor plate. This ensures that any subdivision of the plate remains a geometrically coherent, equipment-ready space without residual fragments.
## Self-Similar, Not Repeating

The subdivision boundaries are fixed in the structural grid (they determine where demising walls can be placed) before the building is leased. A prospective tenant is selecting from a defined set of geometrically complete space configurations, not requesting a custom partition arrangement.
The same nesting logic repeats at every scale of the hierarchy — a Key Plan nests into a Tile the same way a Tile nests into a Floor Plate — which is what makes the system self-similar. It is not, however, periodic: the sequence of Key Plans and Tiles along any one floor is set by the actual tenant mix on that floor, not by a repeating grid. Because Key Plan widths vary by tenant category rather than following one fixed module, a single Floor Plate can offer meaningfully more distinct leasehold size combinations than a floor built from one uniform unit repeated to fill the space — real optionality for a prospective tenant, not a marketing description of flexibility.

## Application to prototype design
## Where the Specification Lives

The Key Plans and Tiles derivation process runs once per prototype class. The output — the base tile dimensions and the aggregation rules — is then fixed for that prototype. When a new deployment of the same prototype class is undertaken, the floor plate is not redesigned; it is reproduced from the fixed tile parameters.

This means that equipment and circulation standards embedded in the tile — lighting proximity requirements, circulation clearances, adjacency minimums — carry through to every deployment in the prototype class without re-derivation. The tile is the operational specification of the building's usable space, expressed as geometry rather than prose.
The full Key Plan catalog, Tile-type definitions, current dimensions, and the composition rules governing how they combine are maintained directly at [bim.woodfinegroup.com](https://bim.woodfinegroup.com).

## See also

- [[geometry-of-sustainability|Geometry of Sustainability]] — the operating-cost and construction-volume consequences that follow from this same geometry
- [[bim-design-philosophy|BIM Design Philosophy]] — why this system is built on open standards rather than a proprietary one
- [[design-sequence-priority]] — why Key Plans and Tiles is fixed before Building Services and Structural design begin
- [[common-building-code]] — the washroom-provisioning standard built into the Key Plan by tenant category
- [[tile-level-climate-zoning]] — how each tile carries its own climate zone
- [[structural-bay-depth-discipline]] — why the structural grid follows the tile, not the reverse
- [[fixed-floor-plates]] — the floor plate dimensions this system derives
- [[tile-level-climate-zoning]] — how each Tile carries its own climate zone
- [[structural-bay-depth-discipline]] — why the structural grid follows the Tile, not the reverse
- [[fixed-floor-plates]] — the Floor Plate dimensions this system derives
- [[boma-standard]] — how Key Plan and Tile boundaries relate to BOMA measurement conventions