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.
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.
There is a meaningful difference between an architecture firm that produces drawings and one that genuinely thinks through problems with you. Understanding that distinction before you hire can determine whether a project succeeds or stalls when complications arrive.
