From a first conversation to the keys in your hand, a project moves through distinct phases. Knowing which one you are in tells you what decisions are cheap now and expensive later.
Clients often meet a project in the middle, when there are already drawings to look at, and understandably assume that is the beginning. In fact the most consequential decisions were made earlier, and the most expensive mistakes come from trying to reopen an early decision once a later phase has built on top of it. Understanding the sequence is the best way to spend your attention where it actually counts.
1. Brief and feasibility
Before a single line is drawn, we establish what the project needs to do, what the site and the regulations allow, and whether the ambition fits the budget. This is the cheapest phase in which to change your mind and the most powerful, because every later decision inherits these constraints. A week of honest feasibility work has saved many projects from a year of expensive redesign.
2. Concept and schematic design
Here the building takes its first real shape: its massing, its orientation, the arrangement of its spaces, its relationship to the site. The drawings are deliberately loose because the point is to test big ideas quickly and cheaply. This is where the climate strategy, the structural logic and the character of the building are set, so it rewards engagement from the client more than any later phase.
3. Design development
The agreed concept is now resolved and coordinated. The architecture, structure and services are brought together and made consistent with one another, materials and systems are chosen, and the drawings tighten from intent into specifics. Most of the quality — and most of the cost certainty — of the finished building is locked in during this phase.
4. Construction documents and permitting
This is the detailed, technical phase that produces the drawings and specifications a contractor can build from and an authority can approve. It is unglamorous and exacting; its completeness is what separates a smooth site from one plagued by questions, variations and delay. Gaps left here resurface on site as change orders, which are the most expensive way to make a decision.
5. Construction, supervision and handover
Finally the building is built, and the engineer's role shifts to supervision: verifying that what is constructed matches what was documented, resolving the conditions the site reveals, and inspecting the work as it is covered up and cannot be seen again. The phase — and the project — closes with the handover inspection and the snag list, when the building formally becomes yours.
