Our innovation track record
Our talent for innovation has won us more than 100 industry awards in the last five years. These include numerous RIBA awards, being named Building Magazine Sustainable Designer of the Year, a high commendation in the CONSTUCT Awards for Innovation and Best Practice (One Southampton Row), a Spark Award, and a World Architecture Festival Award (Arts Alliance mobile performance venue), to name just a few. In 2006, we were awarded a Queen's Award for Enterprise: Innovation, a rare honour in the construction industry.
Refining design insights to add value
Continuous research and development underpin our many innovations. New ideas are often refined as they evolve through a sequence of projects. For example our geotechnical team devised innovative modelling techniques in order to found a raft at depth in Mercia Mudstone in Wales (St David’s 2, Cardiff), something no one had done previously. Later, these modelling capabilities were adapted to enable us to propose an as-yet untried foundation technique in a different soil type, this time for the Black Sea Hotel in Batumi, Georgia. Project ambitions and constraints could not have been more different for these two projects, but each was a first of its kind in its context.
Similarly, our structural engineers have achieved many firsts in parametric design. When faced with the challenges of realising some of the most audacious architectural forms yet imagined, such as architect Zaha Hadid’s Opus project in Dubai and BIG’s design for the Presidential Library in Astana, we found existing 3D modelling software lacking. So we wrote our own algorithmic scripts. Responding to the demands of each job with bespoke coding has added to the overall analytic capacity of the practice. Moreover, it has revolutionized the digital design of buildings, allowing structures to be built that were simply unbuildable only five years ago.
These are just a few examples of our track record in innovation and how innovation is central to what we do. There are many more. We provide fresh thinking across a range of disciplines, from the highly technical – parametrics, facade design, geotechnics, building services, wind farm foundation design – to the strategic, such as masterplanning and energy planning.
Innovation timeline
We have plotted the key innovations of the past five years as a timeline that you can download. It documents award-winning projects, advances in R&D as well as growth in new service areas. Every business in the construction industry has faced immense pressures in the past few years. Our innovation timeline tells the story of how we have been meeting the twin challenges of recession and climate change with new solutions, new service areas and new thinking.