Liking the new practice quizzes so far.
One misleading answer I’ve come across so far in the PA section is section 2 #13.
On the actual exam would we actually ever round up?
For this question I thought it was obvious to round down to 5 as if we build up to 6 at the allowable building area we would go over our maximum allowed floor area by our
FAR.
You could make the argument that in practice we would create the setback but the problem does not state that as an option.
So this is an example of “adding to the question” which we have trained ourselves not to do for these exams right?
Can one of our coaches chime in here please? thanks!
Q & A below for reference.
An architect is designing a new commercial building on a site that is 95 feet deep with 55 feet of street frontage. The zoning ordinance in the downtown district requires all new commercial buildings to have a maximum FAR of 3.0 and 10-foot setbacks on all sides.
Assuming that each floor is built to the maximum allowable footprint, what is the maximum number of floors this building can have?
5
stories
An FAR of 3.0 allows a maximum buildable area of 15,675 sf:
Maximum floor area = 95’ x 55’ x 3.0 = 15,675 sf
Then determine the actual buildable area with the setbacks.
**95’ deep - 10’ front setback - 10’ rear setback = 75’ **
55’ wide - 10’ side setback - 10’ side setback = 35’
A building at 35’ x 75’ will provide for 2,625 sf per floor
15,675 sf / 2,625 sf = 5.97 floors, which rounds to 6 floors.
This means that the first 5 floors of the building will be built to the maximum allowable setback, and the sixth floor will be slightly smaller in order to comply with FAR regulations. In practice, it would make sense to divide the floor area equally across the six floors so there is not a small setback at the top level.