Download BD+C’s 2021 Design Innovation Report

Have you wondered why some design ideas soar and others crash? Why clients embrace or reject a design concept? Whether your firm’s designs are trendsetters or followers?

To get answers to those and other design-related questions, Building Design+Construction polled the industry earlier this year, and received responses from 342 companies, most of which were architects, engineers, and contractors. The result of that survey is BD+C’s 2021 Design Innovations Report, whose 22 pages explore the complexities behind creating, pitching, and executing new ideas.

The purpose of this report is to:

Uncover where AEC firms focus their efforts and how they stimulate new ideas;
Gauge how receptive owners and developers are to project ideas, and why;
Reveal which design trends—such as modularity, or the use of mass timber—are (or aren’t) catching on
Examine whether firms’ idea machines are keeping pace with the rate of change in business, lifestyle, and society.

Some takeaways from the report include:

The biggest factors that result in an innovation’s success or failure are cost, client buy-in, and communication;
Several typologies—offices, education, multifamily, healthcare—are glaring in their need for innovation, even as these same building types have been cited as design leaders in the past;
Contractors are often their clients’ gatekeepers when it comes to deciding which design innovations fly;
Mentoring and training are the primary catalysts within AEC firms for nurturing new ideas;
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the need for design innovations, especially for indoor air quality and wellness.

The report makes clear that there’s no shortage of ideas or new products, and that “innovation” and “technology” are often thought of together.

Download BD+C’s 2021 Design Innovation Report (short registration required)

Thanks to a $45 million federal appropriation to the Smithsonian Institution, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., has broken ground on what is expected to be one of the most energy-efficient laboratories in the country. The 69,000-sf lab is targeting LEED Gold and is expected to use 37% less energy and emit 37% less carbon dioxide than a similar building.

| May 25, 2011

World’s tallest building now available in smaller size

Emaar Properties teamed up with LEGO to create a miniature version of the Burj Khalifa as part of the LEGO Architecture series. Currently, the LEGO Burj Khalifa is available only in Dubai, but come June 1, 2011, it will be available worldwide.

| May 25, 2011

Developers push Manhattan office construction

Manhattan developers are planning the city's biggest decade of office construction since the 1980s, betting on rising demand for modern space even with tenants unsigned and the availability of financing more limited. More than 25 million sf of projects are under construction or may be built in the next nine years.