How to Make Your Own Bubble Diagram

A bubble diagram in architecture is a quick, loose way of planning how spaces relate to each other before you start drawing walls, doors, or exact dimensions.

Think of it as the logic underneath the floor plan. Instead of drawing a bedroom as a precise 12′ × 14′ rectangle, you draw a bubble labelled Bedroom. You then place bubbles for the bathroom, kitchen, living room, patio, laundry, etc. Their positions show which spaces should be close together, separated, connected, or accessible from one another.

What the bubbles mean

The size of a bubble can roughly represent how important or large the room should be. It doesn’t need to be proportional yet.

The position represents relationships. If you want the kitchen directly connected to the dining room, those bubbles touch. If you don’t want bedrooms opening directly onto the living room, you separate those bubbles and perhaps put a hallway between them.

Lines or arrows can show movement and connections.

For example:

                  [ PATIO ]
                     |
                     |
 [ KITCHEN ] — [ DINING ] — [ LIVING ]
      |
 [ LAUNDRY ]
      |
   [ YARD ]


              [ HALLWAY ]
              /        \
       [ BEDROOM ]   [ BEDROOM ]
             \         /
              [ BATH ]

Already, without drawing a single wall, you’ve made several architectural decisions.

How to make your own

Start with a room/space list, not a drawing. Suppose you’re designing a house:

Public: living room, dining room, kitchen, porch, powder room
Private: primary bedroom, other bedrooms, bathrooms
Service: laundry, pantry, storage, garage
Outdoor: patio, garden, pool, driveway

Then decide the relationships. A simple way is to classify each pair as must be adjacent, nice to be near, or should be separated.

For example, kitchen ↔ dining might be must, primary bedroom ↔ primary bathroom must, kitchen ↔ pantry must, bedrooms ↔ living room separate, and guest bathroom ↔ living area near.

Now draw bubbles and move them around until those relationships make sense.

Then add the site

This is where bubble diagrams become much more useful architecturally.

6

Draw your property boundary and mark important conditions such as road/access, north, morning and afternoon sun, prevailing breeze, good views, bad views/noise, slope, existing trees, neighboring buildings, and outdoor areas you want to preserve.

Then place your bubbles in response to those conditions.

For example, you might discover:

                  GOOD VIEW
                     ↑

        [ BED ]    [ BED ]
             \      /
             [ HALL ]

 [GARAGE] — [ENTRY] — [LIVING] — [PATIO]
    ↑                    |
  ROAD                [DINING]
                         |
                      [KITCHEN]
                         |
                      [UTILITY]

                     ↓
                 SERVICE YARD

Now the diagram isn’t merely saying “I need these rooms.” It’s saying “this is how the building should work on this particular piece of land.”

Bubble diagram → actual floor plan

The important part is not to start worrying about walls too early.

A useful progression is:

Requirements → relationship list → bubble diagram → circulation → rough room shapes → dimensions → walls/doors/windows → developed floor plan.

You can also make several bubble diagrams quickly. That’s actually preferable. Try one with the bedrooms on one side, another with bedrooms upstairs, another wrapped around a courtyard, etc. Ten minutes spent testing bubbles can prevent hours of redrawing a detailed floor plan.

And you don’t need architectural software for this stage. Paper and pencil are excellent. Graph paper, a tablet, PowerPoint, Canva, or even circles cut from paper that you physically move around will work.

If you’d like, we can also build your first bubble diagram together from scratch. You give me the type of building and the spaces you want, and I’ll walk you through the architectural reasoning rather than simply arranging rooms randomly.

MORE ARTICLES