AIRA
Departments and rooms
Step two — the spatial programme: departments, the rooms inside them, and how the area is allocated.
Departments turns the brief into a programme: the blocks the building is made of, and how much area each gets. This is the step most projects spend the most time in, because it is where a brief becomes numbers.
What you get
A list of departments, each with an area allocation and a set of rooms. Rooms carry their own counts and areas, so a department is not just a number — it is a schedule you can interrogate.
Vertical circulation and building core are treated as departments like any other, rather than as a special case. If you need more of either, add area to them the same way you would to anything else.
Editing the programme
- Change any area or room count directly — the totals re-derive as you type.
- Add a department or a room that the brief implied but AIRA did not produce.
- Remove anything that does not belong.
- Ask for a change in the chat — *"add a 40 m² server room to IT"* — and AIRA will record the request and offer to re-run.
Your edits are overrides, not overwrites
An edited value is recorded as an override on top of the generated payload. That is what lets a later re-run keep your corrections instead of quietly reverting them, and it is why the interface can always tell you which numbers you set yourself.
Against the envelope
The total programme area is checked against the buildable envelope established in Project Context. If the programme does not fit, that is surfaced rather than silently clipped — a programme that has been trimmed to fit without telling you would be worse than one that is honestly over.
Careful
Over-reporting is as wrong as clipping. If a figure shows a band exceeding the cap, the excess shown is the real excess — do not assume the drawing has been adjusted for legibility.