Some areas need to be close. Others need to be nowhere near each other.

Relationship planning documents proximity and separation requirements systematically — so they're a deliberate design input, not an afterthought discovered during commissioning.

What It Is

A scored reference, not a gut feeling

Every department, lab, and functional area in a facility has a relationship to every other one — some pairs need to sit close together to work efficiently, others need distance for safety, security, noise, contamination control, or plain workflow logic. Left undocumented, those needs get guessed at during design and discovered the hard way during commissioning.

VCE scores every meaningful pair of areas across five relationship tiers, from absolutely necessary to undesirable. The result is a relationship chart — a single reference that every layout option gets checked against, so adjacency decisions are traceable back to a real requirement instead of whoever spoke up loudest in a meeting.

Typically used when

You're deciding what needs to be adjacent to what — and what needs to be kept apart — for safety, efficiency, regulatory, or workflow reasons.

The Scoring System

Five relationship tiers

Every pair of areas gets scored against this scale. It's what turns "these two departments should probably be near each other" into a documented, defensible requirement.

A — Absolutely Necessary

E — Especially Important

I — Important

O — Ordinary

X — Undesirable

Sample Work · Anonymized Client Engagement

Made visible

Relationship diagram showing color-coded proximity requirements across floors and buildings

Colored lines show where departments and equipment need to be close, and where they need to be kept apart, across floors and buildings. Labels and identifying details have been replaced to protect client confidentiality — the underlying analysis is real.

Every department pair scored across 5 relationship tiers, spanning 2 buildings & 4 floors

Triangular relationship matrix scoring proximity needs between every pair of areas

The scoring behind the diagram above, in matrix form — every area checked against every other area, so no relationship gets missed.

What You Get

A reference every layout gets checked against

Relationship chart

A visual diagram showing scored proximity and separation requirements between every meaningful pair of areas.

Relationship matrix

The same requirements in tabular form — easy to hand to an architect or reference during layout review.

Documented rationale

Why each score was assigned, so the requirement survives past the meeting where it was decided.