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.
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 hiring an architect is the first real decision on a building project. How the project gets delivered, through design-bid-build, CM at risk, or design-build, is decided earlier than that and shapes risk, cost, and schedule for everything that follows. Here is how each method works and how to choose the right one.
Vacant retail boxes, tired offices, and aging warehouses are increasingly becoming churches, campuses, and community spaces. Here is why adaptive reuse has gone mainstream, where it saves real money and time, and the early investigation that separates a sound opportunity from an expensive surprise.
There is a particular silence that falls when the construction bids land well above budget. How a firm responds in that moment reveals what kind of partner you actually hired. Here is how we treat an over-budget bid as a design problem, not just an accounting one.
Most building projects begin with a square footage guess, and that guess is where budgets quietly come apart. Here is how the programming phase defines what you are actually building, and why it sets the budget long before anyone draws a line.
Most organizations buy the land first and call an architect second. The most consequential decisions in a building project are made before a deed is signed. Here is the feasibility work that protects everything that comes after it.
