AIRA
Adjacency and stacking
Step three — which departments want to be near each other, and how they stack across floors.
Adjacency works out how the programme should be arranged: which departments need to touch, which merely benefit from being close, and which must be kept apart.
The three relationship kinds
- Direct
- These departments need to adjoin. A shared wall, a shared door, a direct route.
- Indirect
- Proximity helps but contact is not required — same floor, short walk.
- Restricted
- These must be separated. Acoustic, hygienic, security or statutory reasons.
The bubble diagram
Relationships are drawn as a bubble diagram — departments as circles sized by area, relationships as the links between them. It is editable: drag a department to move it, and change a relationship's kind directly.
Vertical stacking
Alongside the plan-level relationships, this step proposes how the programme distributes vertically — which departments land on which levels, and which group into zones that should stay together across floors.
The stacking arrangement is part of the adjacency result, not a separate document. Read it and edit it from the adjacency step.
Tip
Stacking is where a programme that looked fine in plan often turns out to be impossible — a department that needs ground-floor access and also needs to adjoin something on level four. Reviewing stacking before you draw saves the discovery until after.
Carrying it into a drawing
Once adjacency is accepted, the programme is complete and the Boards wall shows the whole thing. From there, open an iteration and draw over it in SpaceDesign.