Skip to main content
Al Whitley/3 min read

Understanding Building Elevations: A Comprehensive Overview

Elevation Conventions

Multiple Elevations

Front, rear, left, and right showing each face.

Heights Above Datum

Floor levels, plate heights, and roof ridges marked.

Material Hatches

Brick, stone, siding, glass — different patterns per material.

Window & Door Locations

Opening positions and sizes shown on each elevation.

Master Blueprint Reading at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Blueprint Reading & Construction Estimating Course teaches reading drawings, takeoffs, and estimating fundamentals.

This lesson is a preview from our Blueprint Reading & Construction Estimating Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.

This tutorial walks through understanding building elevations: a comprehensive overview, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

This is our A1.2 sheet, the Building Elevations. You can see I have four images, again, numbered from top down, so one, two, three, four, again, numbering from the top down. I have my Front Elevation, my Left Elevation, my Right Elevation, and my Rear or Back Elevation of the building.

You can see that I've contained the information in the Front Elevation, so we'll be zooming in on that in a second. Again, I have my keynotes on the right, so there's a section over here for my keynotes. I have my Title Block information in the bottom right, and I have my Graphic Scale.

If I were to go on and zoom in around the house, you'll notice that we have the roof up here. You might notice that the hatch on this roof is a little bit darker than the hatch on this roof back here, and that is because this roof is closer, and typically, graphically, when we draw elevation kind of information, if something is closer, we have that information drawn more darkly than if it's in the back. When you look around the drawings, you will notice that we have our Plate Elevations.

We have our Top of Plate and Top of Slab, which is our Floor Plan, and like we mentioned in our previous drawing set, we have Vertical Control information provided on the elevations. So I have my Top of Slab measurement. I have my Top of Plate, and I'm showing that vertical distance right here.

Down over here, I'm showing the distance from the Top of Slab to the Adjacent Grade, which is how the ground is graded out in the image. You will see my keynotes, the square boxes, and you will also see some more Drafting Symbols for call-outs for details. So you can see, for example, that I have detail number eight, and A1.2 is the first page on which that detail is presented.

You'll notice that I have the circle with the lines. There's a line that comes down, and then the line thickens at the bottom. Where the line thickens at the bottom is showing us where the detail would be cut.

So what I have going on here is I have a Head Detail. A head is the top of the window. I have a Sill Detail, which is the bottom of the window, and I have a Jamb Detail, detail number seven, which is a side cut through the window.

So I have my Head, my Sill, and my Jamb Detail. Over here on detail four, I'm showing a condition, a detail, at the Ground, and then I have details five, three, where detail five is a Head Detail at the door, detail three is a detail at the sill, and detail six is a detail at the jamb. So again, I have my different details that I'm presenting in this image.

So again, please spend some time looking at this drawing, and I believe you can see that the reason we don't call out this information, you know, the Plate Elevations and the keynotes, is that people understand that the drawings are representative. It would be redundant or unnecessary to call out the information on more than one occasion.