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 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.

From equipment geometry to tile

The base tile is derived by measuring the physical geometry of the primary equipment configuration for each professional tenant category:

• 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

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.

The self-similar and aperiodic character

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.

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.

Tiles and floor plate subdivisions

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.

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.

Application to prototype design

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.