Yes and no. You never should expect the plans to be 100% from an architect. One of the strategies in our industry is to pay an architect a certain amount of their total fee to complete the design and documentation with the idea that a certain amount of fee will be leftover for construction to solve things in real time.
That is the most efficient use of your investment dollars on any building that you want to design and have built. If you do not engage an architect for construction, which a lot of architects will outright refuse [to not be involved], but even if the ones that you’re working with will consider not being involved with the construction, we would just advise clients to be aware of the fact that they’re going to have to make a lot of decisions that an architect would have been very well suited to help them make during construction and that we advise our clients to be aware that the drawings are not complete.
They’re never intended to be complete. They’re intended to be a really good guideline or outline of the intent for a team to complete during construction. So, the answer is no, the drawings are never 100% complete at the level of detail everybody might have in their mind. But they’re complete enough for a good team to implement during the construction process. And that good team is going to be better if the architect is included in that part of the process.