Buro Happold orchestrates the future of communities with creative and sustainable solutions

Developing a thriving community is more than just constructing new buildings or laying down roads. The true magic comes from designs that aim to have a positive impact on people — their health, wellbeing, environment, and the economy.

For more than 45 years, integrated consultancy of engineers, consultants, and advisers, Buro Happold has built a world-class reputation for delivering creative solutions for a changing world. The company works with diverse experts in many fields — from engineering and technology to ecology and acoustics — who collaborate and provide support for a variety of building, infrastructure, and environmental projects.

“We all specialize in different areas, but at the end of the day, everyone at Buro Happold is a thinker, creator, and problem solver,” says Linaka Greensword, creative lead for projects at Buro Happold. “Everyone aims for creative solutions that support our clients while bringing social value to communities.”

When working on a project, consultants incorporate a wide range of ideas, from protecting biodiversity, to considering the effects that pollution or noise may have on people nearby, to sourcing materials for the least amount of environmental impact. It can be difficult to fully convey the importance of such broad ideas to clients. That’s where Greensword and her creative team step in. They work with in-house consultants to translate big ideas into visuals that explain complex concepts in easy-to-understand ways.

“Everyone at Buro Happold embodies creativity, but our team specializes in understanding how to communicate that creativity to anyone,” explains Greensword. “We support projects across the company and we’re often looking at tight turnaround times. But we’re not aiming to rush things — we need to get clients emotionally invested, and that means leveraging visual media. Working with Adobe Creative Cloud allows us to be very efficient while giving us the tools to bring our artistic vision to clients.”

Illustrating the future of city construction

Buro Happold’s sustainability consultants were engaged by C40 Cities to partner on a series of reports that recommend actionable policies aimed at delivering efficient and sustainable construction projects that can help mitigate construction’s impact on climate change. For the C40 Cities Clean Construction Programme, Greensword and the creative team created a series of aspirational cityscapes to capture the feeling of the bright, clean future envisioned by the C40 Cities initiative.

Starting with linework in Adobe Illustrator, Greensword's team built up multiple layers to capture the perspective points for towering buildings, rows of green trees, and colorful street stalls. Once the foundations were laid, they moved to Adobe Photoshop to add textures, colors, and dynamic lighting to the facade. To bring the imagery to life, the pieces were finalized in Adobe After Effects with subtle screen wipes and animations for use as Instagram Reels.

“We chose a very colorful and lighthearted palette to convey the idea of a brighter future,” says Greensword. “I tend to use Adobe Color to create my palettes, but for the Clean Construction project, we actually used Adobe Fresco. We could start with our core colors and then blend them together like watercolors to find the proper mixtures of tones for every cityscape.”

As with most creative projects at Buro Happold, Greensword also leveraged Adobe Stock. Creators transformed stock photography into dynamic silhouettes showing people shopping, biking, or playing along the city streets.

“We use Adobe Stock all the time as a starting point for our work,” explains Greensword. “The filters make it easy to find exactly what we need — from images with space for copy to specific types of trees for an ecological survey. We don’t always use the entire image either. We might pull out a car or even just one vector, then add color, change line weight, and blend it seamlessly into our finished image. It helps us work more efficiently and concentrate on refining the message that we’re sending rather than trying to draw an electric vehicle by hand.”

Building upon solid creative foundations

Greensword and the rest of the creative team at Buro Happold continuously explore ways to push the limits of technology and creativity to better communicate the teams’ creative vision with clients. The team pushed the limits of Adobe XD to create exploding technical illustrations without creators needing to code advanced animations. Creators also introduced a user interface in Adobe Acrobat that guides different client stakeholders through the most relevant information in documents in PDF.

“We like to say that good work leads to more work,” says Greensword. “We’re always building upon past work. We’re constantly growing and evolving, allowing us to work smarter and communicate our most innovative ideas to clients.”