Most architect interviews are run backwards. The owner books an hour, the firm arrives with a polished slide deck, and for forty minutes the committee watches photographs of buildings that were designed for other people, on other sites, with other budgets. There are a few minutes for questions at the end, someone asks about fees, and everyone goes home with an impression of which firm had the nicest pictures. If you are trying to figure out how to hire an architect, the most useful thing we can tell you is that the portfolio is the least informative part of that hour. A portfolio tells you what a firm built for someone else; the interview is your only chance to learn what it will be like to build with them.

We sit on the other side of that table often, and we would rather be interviewed well than pitched to politely. A well-run interview protects the owner, and it gives a serious firm the chance to show how it thinks. What follows is what we would tell any owner about to choose the team they will work beside for the next two to four years.

Do your homework before anyone walks in the room

The quality of the interview depends on what you bring to it. Before you meet a single firm, write down in plain language what problem the building is supposed to solve, roughly what it needs to contain, what you think you can spend, and when you need it. None of this has to be precise, and a good architect will help you refine every piece of it, but you cannot judge whether a firm understands your project if you have not described the project to yourself first. The American Institute of Architects makes the same point in its guidance to owners, noting that your ability to communicate your vision, budget, and functional needs, along with providing timely feedback, is essential to a successful outcome.

The second piece of homework is deciding, in writing, what you are selecting for. Public agencies that hire architects through qualifications-based selection set their evaluation criteria before they review a single submission, and private owners should borrow that discipline. Relevant experience, the strength of the specific team, availability, approach to budget control, and how well the firm communicates are all reasonable criteria, and it helps to weight them before you have a favorite. This matters most when a committee is doing the hiring. A finance chair, a facilities volunteer, and a senior pastor will each notice different things in the same hour, and without agreed criteria the decision tends to drift toward whichever presenter was the most charismatic.

Find out who will actually do the work

The person who presents is not always the person who designs your building. In many firms a principal leads the pursuit and a project architect or project manager runs the work day to day, and that second person is the one who will answer your calls, attend your committee meetings, and walk the site during construction. Ask to meet them, and ask them directly how many other projects they are carrying right now. It is also fair to ask what happens if that person leaves halfway through, and who the structural, mechanical, and civil engineers will be and how often the firm has worked with them. A team that has solved problems together on a dozen projects coordinates very differently from one meeting for the first time on yours.

Give them a real problem instead of asking about process

Nearly every firm has a rehearsed answer to “tell us about your design process,” and the answers sound remarkably alike. A better approach is to describe one real difficulty from your project and ask how they would think about it. Perhaps your site slopes twelve feet from the street, or your parking count barely meets code, or your early budget and your wish list are clearly not on speaking terms. Then pay attention to what happens next. The firm that starts asking questions before offering answers is showing you how it will behave in design meetings, and the firm that immediately delivers a confident single solution is showing you something too.

We would encourage you to keep a rough count of how much of the hour the firm spends talking and how much it spends asking. The AIA’s own advice to owners ends on a simple test, which is to find an architect who makes you feel comfortable and listens intently. That sounds soft, but it is one of the most practical criteria on the list. An architect who does not listen well in an interview, when they are trying hardest to win your trust, will not listen better in month eighteen when the bids are in and the committee is tired.

Ask about the project that went wrong

Every experienced firm has had a project where the bids came in over budget, the schedule slipped, or the owner and contractor ended up in a dispute. Ask about one. You are not looking for a firm with a spotless record, because a firm that claims it has never had a hard project is either very new or not being straight with you. You are looking for how they describe what happened, what they did about it, and what they changed afterward. Our own view, which we have written about in the questions owners do not know to ask, is that the value of experience is mostly pattern recognition about what goes wrong, and this question is the fastest way to see whether a firm has that.

References deserve the same specificity. Instead of asking a past client whether they were happy, ask whether the bids came in near the architect’s estimate, how change orders were handled during construction, how quickly the architect responded when the contractor had a question in the field, and whether they would hire the same firm again for their next phase. If you can, ask the firm for a reference from a project that had real difficulty. How a client talks about an architect after a hard project tells you far more than a testimonial from one where everything went smoothly.

Talk about fees without letting fees decide

Fees matter, and you should talk about them openly. The AIA notes that design service fees on larger commercial projects commonly range from 5 to 20 percent of the overall project budget, depending on complexity, experience, geography, and the services included. The trouble is that two fee proposals can differ by a wide margin simply because they describe different amounts of work. One may include construction administration with regular site visits, full engineering, and 3D visualization for your fundraising or approvals, while another covers drawings through permit and leaves everything after that to be negotiated. Before you compare numbers, compare what is in them.

This is why public owners are required by the federal Brooks Act, and by many state laws, to select design professionals on qualifications first and negotiate the fee with the top-ranked firm afterward. The logic is that the design fee is a small fraction of what a building costs to build and operate, and the quality of the design has a large effect on the rest. The research on that approach is worth knowing.

A private church or business is not bound by those rules, but the sequence still works well. Rank the firms on the criteria you wrote down before the interviews, open a fee conversation with your first choice, and be candid about your constraints. If you cannot reach an agreement that works, move to your second choice. That approach keeps the fee in its proper place, as something to be negotiated fairly with the right team, rather than letting it quietly pick the team for you.

Decide the same day, and decide on the record

Hold your debrief immediately after the last interview, while the impressions are still distinct. Ask each person on the committee to score every firm against the agreed criteria on their own before anyone discusses the results, and only then compare notes. This keeps the loudest voice in the room from setting the outcome, and it gives you a written record of why the decision was made. That record matters more than it seems. Building projects tend to outlast committees, and when a new board member or a new pastor asks two years from now why this firm was chosen, you will have an answer rooted in criteria rather than memory.

It is also worth remembering that the interview is not the end of your responsibilities, only the beginning. Once the contract is signed, the owner’s job shifts to making timely decisions, reviewing pay applications, and keeping the project’s purpose in front of everyone, which we cover in more depth in what owners need to do during construction. The firm you choose will shape how easy or how hard that job turns out to be, which is one more reason to choose carefully.

We welcome being interviewed this way. After more than twenty-five years and over a thousand church projects, along with commercial, hospitality, and nonprofit work, we would much rather spend an hour working through your real constraints than walking you through our portfolio, because that is where you can see how we think. You will meet the people who will actually lead your project, and we will tell you plainly where we see risk in your budget, site, or schedule, and we will bring more than one way to address it. If you are preparing to choose an architect, or simply want to understand what a good selection process looks like before you start one, we would be glad to talk it through with you, with no obligation attached.