Tag: pre-design phase

What You Don’t Know to Ask
Architecture, Consulting, Published | July 23, 2026
What You Don’t Know to Ask

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.

What Gets Decided Before the Drawings: Defining the Building Program
Consulting, Planning, Published | June 22, 2026
What Gets Decided Before the Drawings: Defining the Building Program

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.

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One email a month on what actually happens during a building project: permits, budgets, and the decisions that come before design.