Skip to main content
BuildBackBetter

REWARDING INNOVATION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

The Build Back Better Awards are an exciting initiative to champion innovation, creativity, environmental leadership and social purpose in buildings. 


There is a growing realisation that we need spaces that better reflect our changed priorities in terms of our wellbeing and the climate crisis. 


The Build Back Better Awards are designed to celebrate and reward the creative ideas, technologies and initiatives will help shape this new age and the projects that point the way to a better future. 

We’re witnessing a global reset in how and where we work and play. 

Our buildings will need to adapt to accommodate these changes. 

We now want workplaces that put collaboration, inspiration and wellbeing at their heart. Residential buildings that accommodate home working and connection with nature. Retail outlets that are experiential and complement online shopping. Most of all, we need to bring high design values to all of our community, not just the elite. 

New thinking and technology will have a major role to play in our shared future.

The Build Back Better initiative is committed to recognising, rewarding and sharing these ideas and innovations so that we all can benefit. 

The Build Back Better Awards initiative is an industry plan to help accelerate innovation, technology and design change in the built environment.

A consensus is emerging that the current building stock in the office, retail, commercial, leisure, healthcare, education, transport and residential sectors is not optimised for a new paradigm where we live our lives very differently.

We at the Build Back Better Awards passionately believe that it is only by adopting the best ideas, the latest research and ground-breaking designs can we shape the vital next generation of buildings that work for how we live now.

The Build Back Better initiative aims to galvanise and inspire industry executives, designers, inventors, architects, technologists, engineers and researchers into rethinking our collective future and devising the tools that will take us there. 

During the pandemic we witnessed the spectacular acceleration of disruptive trends. Combined with the climate emergency, we face a major ‘reset’ that will change forever the buildings in which we work, rest and play. 


In our view, it’s more important than ever that we shine a light on the innovations that will truly change our age.

We do this in two ways. First, we identify and showcase new thinking from thought leaders and share exemplar project case studies from around the world.

These projects could include an office that’s been radically redesigned for collaboration and team building, a retail outlet that's been repurposed as a food hall and community space, a brownfield building that’s been reimagined as a stimulating shared co-working space for working-local employees, or a reconfigurable home that can adapt to changes in family life and work.

Second, we recognise, reward and celebrate innovation in products, projects, initiatives, platforms and business models.


These could include an exciting technology that improves health and wellbeing in the workplace, an off-site manufacturing process that dramatically speeds up installation time,  a home working station that transforms concentration and productivity or an ambitious redesign of a product along circular economy principles. 


We identify and rate these developments to both alert specifiers in the built environment and give them the independent reassurance that they need that here are innovations of the highest merit.


In a cacophonous business world of competing claims for attention,  an independent stamp of authority – judged by experienced and impartial practitioners – gives vital clarity and allows genuine and unique developments to cut through the noise.


The team behind the Build Back Better Awards believes that we learn from each other, and that we progress by sharing our knowledge, insights and experience.


This new age requires new forms. And the responsibility to create those new forms has fallen to our generation. Only by developing new thinking, new ideas and new technologies can we start to make progress.


So work with us and together, let’s create the future!