About us
Sunrise Architecture Ltd. has a wide range of areas of practice including commercial/retail, hospitality, education, industrial, institutional, renovation, residential and child care projects. It provides attentive professional services to the clients. We are familiar with City's review process & requirements. We pay a lot attention to the design meeting the building code & client's need, & providing well designed drawings. This makes the permit application faster, & saves the client's time & money.
We are experiencing new style of life that requires new way of running business: remote, virtual, more economical, hopefully more efficient.
During construction, quite often, the contractor may say:
1-will the inspector measure this dimension?
2-if the inspector doesn't check this, why do you check it?
3-the inspector said that the site work was OK.
4-the other project nearby was not built in this way.
5-I know this inspector. She/He didn't check this in my previous project. She/He will not check it this time.
All the contractors & clients know that the inspectors & city have the authority for approval. Without the city approval, they cannot get the occupancy permit. But they don't know that the city requests the architect & other professionals to hold the liability for the design. They think if the inspectors are OK with the site work, then it is OK. Quite often they want to save the cost by not following the design. This sometimes may lead to a code issue. This leaves the professionals in an embarrassing situation. We follow the city bylaw & building code when doing the design. But sometimes we cannot get the proper respect from the clients & contractors if we don't agree with them not following the design. They respect the inspectors more than us.
As the professionals, we always work closely with the city & inspectors. Meanwhile, we expect that we could get the support from the city & inspectors. We expect that the city & inspectors could educate the clients & contractors in some way that they should respect our design.
Sometimes the building inspector may flag some site work to be accepted with additional requirements at the completion of the project. Those requirements should have been raised by the city prior to issuing the permit. This will create the difficulty to the contractor & client. For the public & customers, it is common that they don't clearly know if they need the architect's services on their projects. When the project is completed, there is no way to go back & meet city's new requirements. It is not appropriate for the architect & design professionals to do the client a favor by providing the documents for the projects that they are not involved during design & construction.