A building is decided on paper long before the first concrete mixer shows up. Much of the cost overrun that later gets blamed on construction —last-minute changes, demolishing what was just built, weeks lost waiting for someone to make a decision— does not start on site. It starts with an incomplete set of drawings that ends up being finished improvised, with the site foreman making calls that belonged to the designer. At De La Mar we develop architectural design and executive projects for new construction and expansions, industrial and residential, with one simple criterion: the deliverable is not a good-looking folder, it is a set of documents a crew can build from without guessing.
Design and executive project are not the same thing
Architectural design resolves the scheme: what gets built, where, at what areas, how you get in, how people and materials move through it, how it is oriented, how it looks. On an industrial project that stage settles things that cannot be moved later without paying dearly: the production flow, the position of the loading docks and the turning radius of the trucks, the usable clear height under the structure, the floor’s load capacity, the space reserved for the electrical room and —this one always gets forgotten— the direction in which the plant will grow five years from now. On a residential project it settles orientation, ventilation, ceiling heights and the relationship between served and serving spaces.
That stage is where the renders come from. They are useful, genuinely useful: they align expectations, they help decide finishes, they let the client see the building before signing. But you cannot build from a render. A render does not tell you the thickness of the wall, the strength of the concrete, the gauge of the feeder, or where the drain runs. The executive project is exactly that: the translation of a design decision into information that can be built, quantified and contracted.
What an executive project delivers
A complete executive project consists of construction drawings —dimensioned plans, sections and elevations, with grids and levels—, large-scale detail drawings of everything that does not resolve itself (metalwork and window systems, junctions between materials, edges, roof slopes and drainage, walls that stop short of the slab), engineering drawings for each discipline, material and system specifications, calculation and descriptive reports, and quantity take-offs with a bill of items.
The bill of items is the most underrated piece. It is what lets you compare three contractors’ bids apples to apples, and it is the most honest test of whether the project is properly defined: if three companies price it and the numbers land close together, the executive project is complete. If one comes in far below another, it is almost never because it is cheaper; it is because it is pricing less, and whatever is missing will show up later as extra work, when there is no negotiating room left because the site is open and the contractor is already inside.
The executive drawings are also the input for permitting. For a construction license, a Mexican municipality typically asks for the architectural project signed by a licensed responsible party, the structural report and drawings, the building services, and compliance with the land-use, ground-coverage and floor-area parameters of the lot. A project drawn without looking at those constraints gets redesigned from scratch, and that is not an adjustment: that is starting over.
Coordination between disciplines
This is where the real value of an executive project sits, and it is the part you almost never see in the deliverable. Architecture, structure, electrical and plumbing all share the same physical volume, and that volume is not big enough for everyone. The beam runs exactly where the main duct was going. The rainwater downpipe lands on a column grid line. The electrical conduit was supposed to be embedded in the slab, but the slab has already been poured. The clear height the client asked for is gone because nobody added up the beam depth, plus the duct, plus the sprinkler, plus the ceiling.
Every one of those clashes costs the same if it is caught early: a few hours of drafting. And something else entirely if it is caught on site: demolition, wasted material, labor done twice and, above all, time. The rule is well known and has no exceptions: the further along the work is, the more expensive it becomes to change the same thing. That is why clash review between disciplines —cross-checking every trade’s drawings before any of it exists in concrete— is where an executive project pays for itself several times over.
On industrial work, the critical coordination is usually electrical. The position of the substation and the switchgear room, the service entrance route, the trenches and pull boxes, the underfloor conduit and the provisions for future machinery are decisions made in the project and frozen the moment the slab is poured. Having electrical engineering and civil works resolved under the same roof is not a sales argument: it is the difference between coordinating and negotiating between two firms that, when something does not line up, point at each other.
Expansions on existing buildings
Expanding is harder than building from scratch, and it usually gets priced as if it were the opposite. The first problem is information: the as-built drawings the client keeps rarely match what was actually built. You have to survey on site —grids, levels, real spans, service routes— and verify before drawing on top of an assumption.
The second problem is capacity. Before assuming the structure can take another bay, a mezzanine or a suspended load, the foundations and existing members have to be reviewed. And in a plant, before bringing in new equipment, you have to check whether the substation, the main switchboard and the utility service can take the added load, and whether there is room left in the motor control center. That review belongs to the project, not to the construction phase: finding out late turns one expansion into two jobs.
The third is operations. Expansion work almost always happens while the plant keeps producing. The project has to define phasing, temporary access, scheduled power outages and what can be executed without stopping the line. That gets drawn and planned; it does not get sorted out on Monday morning with the maintenance supervisor.
From the drawing to the site
An executive project does not end when it is handed over. It stays alive through construction: questions get answered, details get adjusted as things are uncovered, and what changed gets recorded. When the people drawing the project know they will be standing on site defending their own drawings, the level of detail rises on its own; nobody leaves a junction unresolved when they are the one who will have to resolve it at seven in the morning with a crew standing idle.
We work the same way for a new industrial building, a plant expansion, an electrical room, offices inside an industrial facility, or a house. The scale changes and the applicable codes change; the criterion does not: define on paper everything that is cheaper to define on paper.
