Architects and mechanical engineers who collaborate on a model need to understand some behavior about rooms and spaces.
In
Revit, architects use rooms and areas to divide a building model by usage, occupancy, or other criteria. Systems engineers, however, use spaces and zones for analysis of heating and cooling loads.
When you link an architectural model to an MEP model, consider the following:
- Spaces (created in the MEP model) can be bounded by elements in linked models, in the host model, or in both.
- Spaces are affected by room separation lines. Rooms are not affected by space separation lines.
- Spaces are measured from the wall finish face.
- Spaces use the computation height that is defined in the architectural model.
- A space understands in which room of a linked model it resides, and it can report the identity of that room. This information is based on relative locations, not on a link to a specific room ID.
- Multiple spaces can access the identity of a single room in a linked model.
- Rooms can exist in design options. Spaces cannot exist in design options.
- If the architectural model changes, spaces are not deleted in the host MEP model. Spaces can become unenclosed, redundant, or ambiguous, as they would if the same changes were made in the host model.
- Modification of one model does not propagate to linked models. If the architectural model and the MEP model link to each other, changes to the architectural model may not be matched by changes in the MEP model until the MEP model is opened, resaved, and reloaded.