A change order lands mid-project and someone has to decide who pays for it. Here is how the three kinds of change orders differ, why your architect is contractually the one who rules on them, and how most of the work that prevents them happens months before construction starts.
Moving in is not the same as finishing. Substantial completion, the punch list, system commissioning, record documents, and the eleven-month warranty review are five separate obligations with their own clocks. Here is what each one does and what it costs an owner to skip it.
Most as-built drawings do not describe the building that is actually standing, and renovation budgets pay for the difference. Laser scanning and an accurate 3D model turn existing conditions from a guess into a measurement before design begins.
More than four out of five construction firms say they cannot fill the craft positions their projects depend on. Labor scarcity has quietly become a design variable, and the decisions that absorb it best are made on paper, long before a contractor is asked to price the work.
Most owners arrive at an architect with the answer already chosen. Before a committee commits several million dollars to new construction, somebody has to be willing to test whether more square footage is the fix. Here is what an honest assessment looks at, and why a firm that will tell you not to build is one you can believe when it tells you to build.
Eight weeks into design, a building committee asked us a fair question: what exactly have you been doing? Design takes as long as it does because design is not drawing, it is deciding. Here is what actually happens in schematic design, design development, and construction documents, and why the design schedule is really a decision schedule.
A committee can approve a floor plan unanimously and still be picturing eleven different buildings. Here is how immersive visualization surfaces the disagreement while it is still free to fix, and why a congregation that has walked through the design votes on a building instead of on trust.
Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S. by the largest margin ever recorded. New codes, rising gas prices, and advances in cold-climate technology have made all-electric construction a mainstream reality, not just a coastal trend. Here is what building electrification actually means for the architect’s drawing set, and why it has to be part of the pre-design conversation.
The questions that determine whether a building project succeeds are rarely the ones clients know to ask at the start. After more than a thousand church projects and twenty-five years of practice, UNITE has learned that the most valuable thing an experienced firm brings to the first conversation is not a solution. It is a better set of questions.
Most owners assume that getting the drawings done is the finish line. It is not. The period between completed construction documents and an issued building permit is one of the most consequential and least understood phases of any project, and how well you navigate it determines when your contractor can actually start.
