How often has this happened to you? You are asked to modify a project from a while ago that you had nothing to do with, aside from judging how the kitchen sink is not centered on the kitchen island, you find every time you move the toilet the floor plan turns into a Jackson Pollock painting. You also begin to wonder how the previous designer had enough brain cells to cobble together passable drawings while you try to ignore the fact that all floor plans do not have a view template associated.

Barring these issues, you notice most importantly that nothing is pinned down. At first, this is not a major issue, as I too like to live on the edge. However, simply pinning objects can save so much time troubleshooting, backtracking, and discovering what unintentionally moved.

Take for example, you clicked on a few walls to move them right, simple enough. Only after several more hours, or days even, of work you notice dimensions are not adding up to what you remember. You then have to spend a significant amount of time cross referencing old drawing sets to finally figure out the exterior wall shifted without your knowledge. Now, you must go through the drawings and readjust everything…again.

If you do not pin down essential elements in a project you WILL eventually have a cascading loss of time to redoing the project, it is never a matter of “if” but “when.” Pinning is the most effective time hedging redundancy when modeling a project. In the most ideal world, we would pin everything in a project and only unpin once we need to shift things around, but that is not practical.

The best solution is to only pin down objects that are crucial core elements to the project which will never change or very rarely change throughout the project lifecycle. What are crucial core elements in a project you ask? I am so glad you asked!

My 5 rules of thumb for which objects should be pinned down:

1.     Levels & Grid Lines

These are the most vital coordination items in every project. In both existing and new construction, once a project is past schematic design, these coordination items should never move unless design development demands it. Nearly all consultants on a project coordinate and reference these dimensions to develop their drawing sets. If things shift around once you send out revised backgrounds that can cause trouble down the line.

2.     Exterior envelope - Walls, floors, roofs, foundations, columns, etc…

While these items are typically aligned to levels or grids, assemblies thickness/length/width can vary throughout the project and cannot always be aligned due to one reason or another where it needs to be offset. Also, once you are past schematic design you usually have a rough assembly thickness assigned and setbacks located so there is usually not any reason to have those items shifting around.

3.     Site work – Property lines, building pads, topo surfaces, landscape foliage, and any CAD imports.

These items are all quite self-explanatory, parts of the project that will never need to move or you do not want to move when used as references.

4.     Aspects of the project I do not want other users to mess with.

If I work with other teammates and there is part of the design I do not want them to alter, I group the objects and pin it down. My team mates then know not to mess with that object as it is complete. This is a work around for when you do not have full Revit with work sharing capabilities.

5.     For objects I accidentally click on regularly.

Revit has a button in the bottom right that allows you to turn off the ability to click on pinned objects. I have found it quite useful when I click on several different objects and I accidentally keep tabbing onto an adjacent floor or wall. There is also a button for you to turn off clicking on surfaces if you were not aware. Once I am done with my task I unpin the object.

P.S. I sometime prefer to pin views and note blocks on a sheet so everything aligns when scrolling through a PDF, especially if there are a lot of details on one sheet but I hold not hard rule on this.

This list does not suggest that you should start to liberally use the pin function, for other workers, that would make the project even worse to manipulate in since they do not know what is or is not pinned. Simply be mindful where a project model should be rigid vs loosey-goosey.

To the naysayers who disagree with my rules of thumb I say, I bet you have the messiest desk in your studio.