Re: floor height

[Seth Teller <teller@csail.mit.edu>]

patrick,

this is an issue that has come up several times.  a few previous
discussions are in the bmg thread archive.

the short answer is that there is no comprehensive list of each
floor's height (let's say, elevation w.r.t. sea level).  nor do
we know the inter-floor distance, which varies not only across
buildings but even within a single building.

for now, we have a procedural solution:  we take the elevation
of the topo map averaged over the building footprint, and call
that grade level for floor 1 (disregarding entry steps/ramps).
then the height of floors 2 through N is constructed by adding
a standard increment (12 or 14 feet) to the floor 1 elevation.

what we really need to solve this is:
  1) a good topo map for the whole campus
  2) a description of the height transition
        from outside grade to inside ground floor
  3) elevation differences for each floor and mezzanine
        with respect to the ground floor

this issue came up in our most recent discussion with greg
knight and mike parkin (cc'ed); greg said they would be
developing some of this data but i'm not sure how much and
when.  greg, mike, comments ?

prof. t.

Patrick Nichols wrote:
> MIC --
>
> How do you decide how high, say, the 2nd floor of a building is? (esp. 
> relative to the first floor)?
>
> I ask b/c i'm wondering:
>
> (a) is it constant for buildings in general (i.e. we assume that all 
> floors are the same height
> (b) does it make sense to embed this value in your output
>
> -Patrick