Facilities Inventory: Building and Room Definitions
Last updated: March 25, 2022
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Any structure that contains a room.
Room Definition
A covered area found within a building with a ceiling height of at least six feet, enclosed on all sides with walls or architecturally defined imaginary boundary lines where a wall does not exist.
Clarifications/Special situations:
- Storage cages are captured as rooms.
- Typically, moveable furniture such as landscape partitions (used to create cubicles and offices) and bathroom stalls are not considered room delimiters
- The edge of a room with a sloping ceiling (e.g. attic) ends at the location where the height reaches 6’.
- Exterior walkways, porches, or loading docks under a cantilevered upper floor or roof are considered rooms.
- An exterior loading dock with a phone is identified as a room in order to assign a room number to the phone jack.
- Support spaces such as changing areas and separate toilet rooms housed within a bathroom are assigned the same room number.
- Lactation rooms can be delimited as their own room within a larger bathroom.
- Shafts are not rooms unless a shaft contains a door and an interior platform; the platform space is measured and assigned as a room.
- Stand-alone exterior generators are equipment and not rooms, even if they have doors and a ceiling at least 6’.
- Elevated water towers are tracked as utilities and do not have rooms.
- The top of a tower may have a room if it has a roof. The Hoffman Challenge Course has a room because the platform has a roof. Shackleton Point is not a room because it has no roof.
- A room must have permanent or “fixed” access. Facility code 2965A, "Cascadilla 770,Univ Whse" has a mezzanine that is only accessible via a rolling stair. This is not a room.
- Regarding tunnels:
- A tunnel must be enterable – meet the 6’ height requirement in order to be drafted as room.
- Access to spaces less than 6’ high shall be indicated on the drawings as “crawl space”.
- Pedestrian tunnels should be drawn in their entirety e.g. between Barton & Teagle, Plant Science & Weill Hall.
- Tunnels terminating in a mechanical room are drawn in their entirety as well as the mechanical room.
- Tunnels terminating in a crawl space will be drawn up to the crawl space with an indication of what kind of opening is at the end.
- Tunnels that are not part of a building or connected to a building would not be drawn.
Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory Classification Manual 2006: A covered contiguous area enclosed on all sides by walls, or imaginary boundary lines referred to as “phantom walls” where a wall does not exist; it may consist of one or more spaces. Covered play areas, covered patios, and covered walkways are exceptions to the enclosure criterion.