When you work with an architect, you will likely spend hours looking at drawings. You will be presented with renderings of past work when you are selecting your architect. As your project moves into the preliminary design stages, you might look at bubble diagrams to evaluate room relationships, and character sketches to get a feel for the materials and spaces in a project. Later in the process you will review preliminary floor plans and elevations, details, or 3D renderings. The point of all these drawings is ultimately to convey your ideas and the architect’s knowledge into a set of documents that communicate the design intent with the builder. But drawings are only half of what the architect uses to communicate with the builder. The other half of the heavy lifting is done by a book called the specifications.

So what are specifications? The short answer is specs are a book that lists each product, component and assembly that goes into a building with a description of the quality level expected, what substitutions are acceptable, how they are to be installed, and how they relate to each of the other components in the building. The long answer gets into contracts, instructions for bidding, etc.  

Different architects treat specifications with differing amount of respect. Some architect’s specifications are boilerplate documents, written to cover typical conditions, and assembled in a short period of time by compiling the various chapters. Some architects write their own specifications using a word-processor or database software and editing down from a master specification by deleting the items in the master document that aren’t in the particular project. Some larger offices may have dedicated in house specification writers, relieving the project managers of that additional time consuming task. After design experience in offices that use various versions of all of the above, I have come to greatly prefer a fourth option: hiring a specification writer on a consultant basis.

This approach to specifications solves all of the typical problems architects have in dealing with specifications, which in turn helps keep the quality level of the project as high as possible.

First, the final few weeks of work on the production of drawings are always the most hectic. In a typical office, this is the time when the project manager begins to finally think about adding spec writing to the ever growing “to-do” list. Specifications tend to get short-changed as a result. A dedicated spec writer will bring the production of the specs along with the production of the drawings so potential conflicts in the documents can be resolved early in the process.

Second, design oriented architects tend to be right-brained, creative types. You want your building to be beautiful, which is probably why you hired an architect in the first place. Spec writers tend to be left-brained, engineering and analytical types. Specifications are dry documents. With a left-brainer coordinating this task, you will get a better specification which in turn leads to a better building, with fewer problems during the course of construction.

Third, a dedicated spec writer is also working for other architects, which means their knowledge base and project experience is rather large. They are therefore a resource for products and finishes, and available to do more in depth research on new products and techniques than the architect.

Finally, and probably the most important, in my experience, the quality of architecture is always better when the design team is collaborative in nature. Hiring a spec writer brings additional individuals to the team with their own experience to draw from early in the process. They help review drawings from a product quality viewpoint and offer alternatives to ultimately make your project the best it can be.