Do you arrange the structural engineering or are the owners responsible for attaining that?
We usually will always be the one to coordinate with a structural engineer. It’s a convenience for us to hire the structural engineer under our umbrella, which we do more often than not, but every once in a while, a client wants to contract directly with that structural engineer.
And that doesn’t really change our relationship with that engineer too much, because we’re still responsible for coordinating with that engineer and making sure that the architectural and structural drawings are aligned with one another. However, there are some distinct disadvantages for a client who is directly contracting with the structural engineer because, at the end of the day, the engineer works for the client, they don’t necessarily work for us as the architect.