A good plan is clear.

It’s easy to understand, to comprehend both as an abstract drawing and as a built form. Good plans come from revising and reworking over initial concept plans until the spatial relationships are attuned both internally and externally.

Good planning demonstrates the values of efficiency, economy and clarity, often as a result of many hours of sketching and redrawing, finally leading to a diagram of distilled refinement.

A good plan is rational, logical, natural and instinctive.

It contributes to economy of space and is lean like an athlete to serve its purpose. It is generous with spatial relationships between volumes and activities.

Le Corbusier, the Swiss modernist famously claimed that:

“The plan is the generator […] It is a plan of battle […] The battle is composed of the impact of masses in space and the morale of the army is the cluster of predetermined ideas and the driving purpose. Without a roof plan nothing exists, all is frail and cannot endure. All is poor even under the clutter of the richest decoration.

The plan is the generator. Without a plan you have a lack of order and wilfulness. The plan holds itself the essence of sensation.”