Buildings

Buildings that deliver your objectives.

Every building has a role to fulfil – whether it be to enable people to live, work, play, make journeys, learn or heal, and each of these functions has its own technical requirements.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a host of new or intensified challenges for building owners and operators. Among them are climate change and environmental regulation, stricter standards for fire safety, waste and air quality, and the advent of new technologies and working practices. Operational resilience in the face of those challenges is crucial to delivering your business goals – and the resilience of your assets is critical to resilience overall.

That’s why a good building needs to be simple to create, operate, adapt and ultimately remove; it must be cost-effective over its lifecycle, respect its environment, and be appropriately functional.

And the lived experience of users, customers, employees and the surrounding community is at the heart of a successful building, whatever its purpose. Providing great experiences leads to better outcomes for everyone.

What can we do for you?

Whether you’re in the public or private sector, we can support your project – we work across a broad range of building types including arts and culture, aviation and ports, commercial, retail and offices, education, healthcare, local and central government, residential and hotels, sports and events venues, and transport buildings.

Building performance engineering

Optimising building performance requires striking the right balance between science, art and economics, and applying ingenuity. This enables you to make the most of investment, minimise the costs of operation, repair and maintenance, and maximise financial return. We call this approach building performance engineering and putting the most appropriate building systems in place is central to this.

Support across the whole building lifecycle

Whether it’s for a new development or an existing building, a single structure or a large estate, we can provide support at any stage of a building’s lifecycle – from project shaping and building design, through delivery, to in-use performance. Or we can work throughout the duration of a project, providing the joined-up thinking needed for optimum outcomes.

Exceptional breadth and depth of expertise and experience

We offer fully integrated cross-disciplinary engineering from our global network of creative thinkers, enabling us to deliver the most complex, technically demanding projects. We bring industry-leading talent together to deliver outstanding outcomes, whether from within our own team or those of our specialist partners.

Creating healthy places

Almost every project has the potential to deliver better outcomes for our health. Often benefits such as improved wellbeing and productivity, a more biodiverse and sustainable environment – and enhancing the desirability of an area – can be achieved without significant additional investment.

Through our approach to design, we can help deliver these benefits to end users and communities, as well as to the workforce operating and maintaining infrastructure assets.

When the New South Wales government asked us to help create a bold new building to rehouse top tourist destination Sydney Fish Market as the catalyst for a multimillion-dollar regeneration of the area, we responded with an innovative and green approach.

Services we provide

Enhancing building outcomes

Our services span the whole asset cycle from advisory and consulting, through design and delivery, to asset management. We understand all phases of the building lifecycle, which enables us to give you the best informed advice at any stage.

We can:

Help you set out a vision that is ambitious and stretching while also affordable, deliverable and technically viable.
Create a building design that provides the best possible chance of meeting your desired goals, while ensuring safety and building in adaptability through model-based and scenario planning.
Ensure your building harmonises with the wider urban system and public realm by using cross-disciplinary and connected thinking to realise synergies and save cost while maximising community benefits.
Put your project on a firm economic footing by finding the right financial model to minimise risk and maximise reward over the lifetime of buildings and infrastructure, enhancing through-life value and return on investment.
Advise on and implement appropriate building systems for asset information management, enabling better decision making from project inception through delivery and handover into operation, adaptation and eventual recovery and reuse.

We can:

Provide planning and commercial expertise to help you overcome physical, legal and policy constraints that might block progress.
Find the right financial model to minimise risk and maximise reward over the lifetime of buildings, enhancing through-life value and return on investment.
Advise on procurement strategy, ensuring you get the right services to meet your changing operational needs and helping you establish processes and protocols to get the most out of digital project delivery.
Ensure the right services are available to deliver capital projects successfully and meet changing operational needs, depending on the through-life service requirements and demands of a building.
Manage and oversee projects, drawing on specialists in visualisation, data analysis, mapping, surveying, permitting and more, to reduce risk, save you money and deliver on schedule.
Define information requirements by advising on and implementing asset information management, helping you to make better decisions, faster and cheaper.

We can:

Lay out a practical, affordable route to decarbonisation that also supports your wider business goals.
Optimise investment plans by carrying out long term analysis of how assets will degrade over time and predicting the likely business outcomes of different levels of intervention.
Improve asset resilience in the face of challenges such as climate change, for day-to-day management as well as meeting future strategic objectives.
Maximise asset value by taking a holistic view and going beyond the balance sheet to consider broader factors, such as social outcomes and understanding the contribution of asset information through the right building systems to decision making processes.

We can:

Ensure a project fits into the larger fabric of its local built environment – planning the building and its surrounding area to provide proximity to the services people need, easy access and inclusion, and enjoyable shared spaces.
Improve building design for outcomes that benefit nature – taking into account air, water, land and natural habitats. We understand that when nature thrives, people do too.
Advise on the use of healthy building materials, products, fittings and furniture – produced without harm to the environment, non-toxic in use, and able to be reused or recycled without harm when no longer required. We have developed a comprehensive list of materials that are benign to users and the environment.
Design out infection transmission pathways, taking account of spatial design, the movement of people, ventilation and shared surfaces – in buildings, the public realm, transport facilities and other shared spaces.

Our people

Meet the team

Our experience

London Stansted Airport transformation programme, UK

We are leading the £600M overhaul of the 1990s terminal building and airside facilities at the UK’s fourth-busiest airport. We have taken a systems led approach, focusing on essential airport operations and then designing around them a building that serves those systems and allows them to be optimised.
Royal College of Art Battersea campus, London, UK

We provided multidisciplinary engineering for a major new research and development campus in central London, which the Royal College of Art describes as its most significant project ever. The college is a keystone institution in the regeneration of the wider Battersea area, requiring a building that makes a strong architectural statement, is sympathetic to its area, provides outstanding teaching, learning and studio spaces for students, and encourages public interest and engagement.
Sydney Fish Market, Australia

When the New South Wales government asked us to help create a bold new building to rehouse top tourist destination Sydney Fish Market as the catalyst for a multimillion-dollar regeneration of the area, we responded with an innovative and sustainable approach. We helped our client deﬁne what the new building could be and supported the tendering process. We are the structural, civil and marine engineer for the three-year tender design phase and now sit client side, assuring the design as technical adviser.
GenZero Schools, UK

We developed a standardised building design for schools which embraces net zero while creating great places for students and teachers. GenZero builds on our track record in creating standardised designs for the Priority School Building Programme, which delivered 90 primary schools using offsite solutions in just five years.
Google office fit-outs, UK and Europe

We supported Google with the fit-out of several European offices. Google wanted to create working environments in which workers would be healthy and productive. We audited construction materials and furniture and created a list of products that are benign to the environment and users – and a list of those that aren’t. We also shaped the buildings’ ventilation strategies so that air was not supplied at street level, minimising workers’ exposure to exhaust gases and particulates.