Measure Gross and Rentable Areas with Area Plans

1. Understand the setup: Areas are independent of Rooms — they live in special Area Plan views and follow measurement rules (gross, rentable), not the room enclosure.
2. Create a gross-area plan:
   1. Go to Architecture → Room & Area (dropdown) → Area Plan (also under View → Plan Views → Area Plan).
   2. In the dialog set Type = Gross Building Area, select Level 1, click OK.
   3. Revit asks "Automatically create area boundary lines associated with all external walls?" — click Yes. The new view opens under Area Plans (Gross Building) in the Project Browser, with purple boundary lines already on the exterior.
3. Place the gross area:
   1. Go to Architecture → Area (in the Room & Area panel), with Tag on Placement active.
   2. Click inside the building — one area fills to the boundary lines, tagged with its name and m².
   3. Click the tag text and rename it (e.g. Gross - Level 1).
4. Create a rentable-area plan the same way: Area Plan, but set Type = Rentable, pick Level 1, click OK (accept the automatic exterior boundaries again).
5. Subdivide the rentable plan:
   1. Use Architecture → Area Boundary (in Room & Area) and sketch lines splitting the floor into zones — e.g. separate the core/circulation from the lettable space. Boundary lines can be drawn or picked from walls.
   2. Place an Area in each zone (Architecture → Area), then rename each via its tag (e.g. Unit A, Core).
6. Adjust boundaries: select any purple area boundary line and drag it — the areas on both sides recompute immediately.
7. Build the area schedule:
   1. View → Schedules → Schedule/Quantities, category Areas (Rentable), click OK.
   2. In Fields, add: Level, Name, Area.
   3. In Sorting/Grouping: Sort by Level, check Footer with totals, and check Grand totals.
   4. In the Formatting tab, select Area and check Calculate totals — without this, the totals rows stay blank.
   5. Click OK: you now have per-level subtotals and a grand total in m².
8. Repeat step 7 with category Areas (Gross Building) if you also want the gross totals, and drag either schedule onto a sheet as usual.

Note: Because area boundary lines are independent of walls, area plans can encode a measurement standard (what counts as rentable) that deliberately differs from the physical model — which is exactly why gross and rentable live in separate area schemes instead of being computed from Rooms.

---

Taught in

• New for 2026 — first taught in BIM + Computational Workflow 2026.