Shortlisted for Structural Awards 2026

We've always been a little obsessed with how things actually get built — the connections, the tolerances, the load paths. For thirty years that's mostly been an internal conversation, since our clients care about the light and the form, about how it feels to stand underneath, not the spine geometry or seismic drift calculations.

Mangrove is our first time up for the Institution of Structural Engineers' Structural Awards, and as far as I can tell, this is the closest thing structural engineering has to an Oscars night. Whether we win isn't decided until November, and honestly that's almost beside the point. Just making the 2026 shortlist means being judged, for once, by people who care how things are designed to get built.

It's a wonderfully and wildly varied field. It's the Terminal 2 rebuild at Manchester Airport and bridges with genuinely enormous spans, the stuff that is engineering, full stop. And then, further down the same list, a cable-tension sculpture at Paddington Station that looks like it wandered out of a Buckminster Fuller sketchbook. Clean and disciplined next to genuinely strange.

I have enormous respect for that community. It's easy to make something that looks good — it's quite another to do that while also paying attention to the physics that govern the world, and some of my favorite professional relationships of the last twenty-five years have been with the engineers who do that work. None of it happens without Arup, who made our very first project possible and every one since. There's no structural-awards shortlist for a glass sculpture without an engineering partner willing to take that problem seriously from day one.

Winners get announced November 6 in London.