.svg)
News
A set of drawings, however carefully made, is a set of instructions — and instructions are only as good as their execution. Between the drawing and the building stand hundreds of small decisions made by many hands over many months: substitutions proposed, details adapted to what arrives on site, sequences compressed when a delivery slips. Left unsupervised, each of those decisions drifts a little from the design intent, and the drift compounds.
Since this practice was founded in 2002, we have supervised the construction of every project we have designed. The two halves of the work are inseparable to us, and this piece explains what the second half actually involves — because it is the part of an architect's service that clients see least and benefit from most.
Supervision means the designer stays responsible as the building rises. In practical terms: regular site visits timed to the critical stages of the work rather than the calendar; inspecting what has been built against what was drawn; reviewing and approving material samples before they are ordered in quantity; answering the contractor's questions with instructions in writing; and certifying that payment stages reflect work genuinely done.
That last point matters more than clients usually expect. Construction contracts are typically paid in stages against progress, and someone independent of the contractor has to confirm that a stage is actually complete before the corresponding payment is released. Without that check, payment tracks the calendar rather than the work — which is exactly the arrangement that lets a project drift furthest from its programme without anyone noticing until it is expensive to fix.
It is worth being clear about what it is not. Supervision is not managing the contractor's labour or programme — that remains the contractor's job. Our role is to protect the design and the client's interest in it, which is a different task and occasionally an adversarial one.
Experience teaches you where buildings go wrong, and it is rarely where clients expect. The moments we will not miss:
Each of these is a point of no return. Catch a problem there and it costs a conversation; catch it a month later and it costs a demolition. Snagging deserves its own mention because it is the stage clients most often try to compress, eager to move in, when in fact a careful final walk-through is what separates a house that feels finished from one that will generate small irritations for years.
Could someone else do this checking? In principle, partly. But decisions on site are design decisions. When a specified material is discontinued, when a beam clashes with a duct, when the tiler asks where the cut tiles should fall — the right answer depends on why the design is the way it is, and nobody holds that knowledge like its author. A third party can check compliance; only the designer can protect intent.
The argument has sharpened since Cyprus's licensing reform introduced independent inspections at three stages of construction, checking built work against permitted drawings. A building that has drifted from its permit is now a formal problem, not a quiet one. Continuous supervision is what ensures there is nothing for an inspector to find.
For the client, supervision converts a stressful process into a documented one. Changes are priced and agreed before they happen rather than argued about after. Payments track reality. The dozens of small site questions receive answers that keep the whole composed, instead of accumulating into a building that is almost, but not quite, the one that was designed.
It also leaves a record. Every project we supervise closes with a photographic and written log of what was built at each critical stage — reinforcement before it was covered, waterproofing before it was buried, services before the walls closed around them. Years later, when a client wants to hang something from a ceiling or knows there was once a query about a particular wall, that record answers the question in minutes rather than requiring anyone to open the structure back up.
That last distance — between almost and exactly — is where a large share of an architect's value lives. It is why all four partners of this practice still walk their own sites, more than twenty years in, and why we have never once handed over drawings and walked away.
