Architecture basics
Floor Plan vs Elevation: What Each Drawing Shows
When you receive architectural documentation — for a new build, a renovation, or a property purchase — it typically includes several types of drawing. Knowing which is which prevents confusion and helps you extract the right measurements from the right document.
What is a floor plan?
A floor plan (also called a plan view or plano de planta) is a horizontal slice through a building, viewed from above. Imagine cutting the building at around 1 metre above floor level and looking straight down — that is what a floor plan shows.
Floor plans display: room shapes and sizes, wall thicknesses, door and window positions, fixed furniture (bathrooms, kitchens), stairs, and the relationship between spaces. All distances in a floor plan are horizontal: widths, lengths, and the distances between features within the same floor.
Floor plans are drawn to scale. This makes them the most useful document for measuring room dimensions, checking if furniture fits, or understanding how spaces connect.
What is an elevation?
An elevation (alzado) is a vertical view of a building's exterior or interior walls, as if you were standing in front of them at a great distance. It shows heights — of floors, windows, doors, ceilings, and the overall building — but not depth.
Exterior elevations show the façade: window positions, materials, roof shape, and floor-to-floor heights. Interior elevations show how a wall looks from the inside: door and window heights, any built-in furniture (like kitchen units), and ceiling heights.
Elevations are drawn to scale just like floor plans. The key difference is the information they contain: a floor plan tells you a room is 4 × 3 m; an elevation tells you the ceiling is 2.6 m high.
What is a section?
A section (sección) is a vertical cut through a building, similar to cutting a cake and looking at the slice face-on. It shows the internal heights of multiple floors, the floor thicknesses between them, stair geometry, and how spaces stack vertically.
Sections are especially useful in multi-storey buildings or whenever vertical relationships matter — like checking whether a mezzanine or loft clearance meets minimum headroom requirements.
For most practical purposes (apartment buying, furniture planning, renovation estimating), sections are less commonly encountered than floor plans and elevations.
What can you measure from each type?
From a floor plan: room widths and lengths, door and window opening widths, corridor widths, the distance between a window and a wall, diagonal room dimensions, and total apartment footprint. These are the measurements most useful for furniture placement, material quantities, and spatial planning.
From an elevation: floor-to-ceiling heights, window sill heights, door heights, the height of a kitchen countertop, the distance from a window to the floor. These matter when choosing tall furniture, calculating paint or tile coverage for a wall, or verifying headroom.
From a section: storey heights, floor slab thicknesses, total building height, stair headroom. These are mostly relevant for structural and building regulation checks.
How to measure each type with MetricCanvas
All three drawing types work with MetricCanvas, because all three are drawn to scale. Upload the image, calibrate against any known reference in the drawing, and start measuring.
For floor plans, calibrate using a door width (standard 80–90 cm) or any stated room dimension. For elevations, calibrate using a standard door height (210 cm) or a stated floor-to-ceiling height. For sections, the printed scale bar is usually the most reliable calibration reference.
One practical tip: when measuring heights from an elevation, make sure your calibration reference is also a vertical measurement. Mixing a horizontal calibration with a vertical measurement introduces error if the drawing is not perfectly to scale in both axes — which is common in scanned or photographed documents.