Practice is the only real way to test whether a method works, so I decided to put bubble-diagram expansion into action on a real exam question. The 2018 paper became the first practice material.
The original bubble diagram looks straightforward at first glance. It shows the main functional zones on the first and second floors, almost as if the plan were simple. But the more closely you look, the clearer it becomes that it identifies only functional areas. It does not show the rooms inside those areas at all. Each zone has to be filled in by the candidate from the written information, which makes the task much harder than it first appears.
So I decided to build out the diagram in two stages: first break the zones down and fix the broad distribution of rooms within each functional area; then combine the zones and clarify how the rooms relate to the outside.
Using the given bubble diagram together with the architectural design requirements, I produced a first-pass bubble analysis. That completed the second stage. In that sketch, stars marked rooms that did not require daylight, and red boxes marked rooms whose exact positions were not specified in the question and therefore had to be decided by the candidate. There were also daylight-requiring rooms that still needed to be placed. Comparing this against the room area schedule made it obvious that many rooms remained unresolved. The difficulty was far from over.
The next step was to list every room and put it in a suitable position on the bubble diagram. While doing that, I caught a mistake: the written information said the mother-and-baby room did not need daylight, but I had mistakenly treated the mother-and-baby waiting room as a space with no daylight or ventilation. That was a clear error.
There was another important point. The first-floor waiting hall includes a 640-square-metre passenger rest area that is double-height, so it occupies 640 square metres on the second floor as well. The requirement said no less than 640 square metres, so I took it directly as 640 for this exercise.
To keep the circulation clear, I used CAD to help organize the thinking, with different colors for different functional zones. That was mainly for ease of viewing during practice. In the exam, color coding would not be allowed, so the lesson is to use simple marks instead. I used symbols such as stars to track daylight and ventilation requirements, and the symbols need a clear legend if they are going to be useful.
At this stage, the task is to set out every room, its area, and whether it needs daylight and ventilation, then map the circulation links. To make those links easier to read, I added traffic circulation as an intermediate hub, and used yellow lines to connect rooms that are vertically connected. Once the key legend is added, the fourth step of the bubble diagram is complete.
The next task is to infer the positions of the missing rooms, calculate each room's area and its place on the overall plan, deform the bubble diagram according to the functional zones, and fix it into the corresponding areas. That means setting up a grid and starting to arrange the rooms.
That was as far as the first stage of this exercise went. The next pass will continue from the grid and room placement.