The most innovative architecture companies for 2025

Architecture is, at its core, about problem-solving: balancing aesthetics, functional needs, and technical constraints to create effective buildings and environments. The most innovative firms in the industry expand this notion, solving pressing issues in new ways that build on or scale up existing techniques and technologies.

Los Angeles-based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, for instance, has advanced the concept of shipping container architecture, ushering it into the realm of sustainable neighborhood development. The firm’s Isla Intersections project in South Los Angeles closed a nearby street (a rarity in car-focused L.A.) to create an active “paseo,” which hosts local farmers markets and other gatherings. Its staggered form, lined with outdoor bridges, terraces, and planted gardens, seamlessly combines multiple buildings and creates a unique setting for community that is nonetheless protected from nearby congestion.

Seattle-based NBBJ partnered with North Carolina healthcare provider Atrium Health to expand the niche field of prefabrication, creating the largest prefab healthcare construction in the United States. Using factory-built units, like facades, bathroom pods, patient rooms, and mechanical systems, the effort has thus far saved $100 million in construction costs and 20% to 50% in construction time. Global firm DLR Group significantly broadened the scope of adaptive reuse—the practice of repurposing existing buildings for new uses—finding new lives for buildings like department stores, hospitals, libraries, and even jails. And New York-based ODA found new life for a former parking garage in Buenos Aires, converting it into a mixed-use office building featuring planted walkways that connect directly to a nearby park.

Not all advances in architecture involve physical buildings. Software giant Autodesk created Total Carbon Analysis for Architects, a digital tool that makes the evaluation of embodied and operational carbon far simpler and more intuitive than it had been for most designers. And Gensler rolled out its Product Sustainability Standards, providing for many in the industry a clear way to measure the carbon impact of the interior products they select. Innovation doesn’t have to mean reinventing the wheel: Often it just means making it better, more relevant, and a lot easier to use.

1. Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects

For turning an “unbuildable” site into a home for the formerly homeless

In 2024, Los Angeles-based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) created a new building on a parcel of land that had long been considered unbuildable. Isla Intersections, a supportive housing development for formerly homeless tenants, is built on a triangle of land right under L.A.’s massive 110-105 Freeway intersection. The development is designed as a vertical village of sorts, with 54 rooms (maximum capacity 112 people) created out of dozens of retrofitted shipping containers.

The building’s staggered profile lessens its overall bulk and provides a sense of privacy, particularly along its interior courtyard, while still connecting to the outside world. A key element of the design is its green “paseo,” located on a former adjacent roadway, which hosts a weekly farmers market. This and a series of rooftop patios and edible gardens—irrigated by a system that reuses water from the building’s sinks, baths, and washing machines—create a much more pleasant living experience, provide fresh food, and improve the overall neighborhood.

The project’s ground floor retail, reserved for local businesses, is designed to further activate the area. The city of Los Angeles is looking to sell more than 1,500 similar parcels to affordable housing developers in the coming years, and Isla provides a case study for how to do this efficiently and with beauty in mind.

2. Kadre Architects

For transforming emergency housing into a joyful place to live

Across Southern California, Kadre Architects is transforming rundown motels into striking transitional housing. Part of California’s emergency housing initiative, Project Homekey, the firm recently completed three housing developments that show how transitional housing can prioritize joy and livability. Collaborating with local housing nonprofit Hope, the Mission, Kadre created Alvarado Tiny Homes Village (Los Angeles, 2022, 45 units), the Woodlands (Woodland Hills, 2023, 43 units), and the Sierras (Lancaster, 2024, 38 units).

The architects enlivened the banal facilities and their bleak surface parking lots with striking graphics, bright colors, and humane architectural and landscape interventions like screens, porches, indoor/outdoor spaces, plantings, and courtyards. Just as significant, the projects were completed in as little as nine months from start to finish, thanks to Kadre’s management of both design and construction and its extensive experience managing codes and permitting. Kadre also made each project energy efficient via PV panels, shade structures, electric water heaters, permeable surfaces, underground infiltration basins, and more.

The firm has been commissioned to work on eight additional Project Homekey sites throughout Los Angeles County, totaling more than 470 units of interim and permanent housing. Some of the projects will also add new community buildings, and all are aiming for net zero energy use.

3. NBBJ

For bringing scalable and stylish prefab architecture to healthcare

Seattle architecture giant NBBJ, along with North Carolina-based Atrium Health, is undertaking the largest prefab healthcare construction program in the U.S., spanning six new hospitals across the state and saving millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. Three of the projects have been completed. The fourth, Atrium Health Lake Normal Hospital in Cornelius, North Carolina, opens in 2025, while the fifth, Carolinas Medical Center Critical Care Tower, has just completed its framing.

Rather than building each hospital on site from scratch, the architects are using repeatable units, such as facades, bathroom pods, patient rooms, and mechanical systems. They are built in factories, delivered to the site, and then assembled. The effort has saved $100 million in construction costs and 20% to 50% in construction time on the first three projects alone, NBBJ estimates.

The firm’s work includes the country’s largest prefabbed hospital, Carolinas Medical Center (2023), which was built with 60% prefab features. While prefab often results in boxy, generic designs, the firm’s approach is delivered with a flexible design framework that allows for more style and choice than typical prefab architecture.

4. Autodesk

For creating a simple carbon-tracking tool with real impact

As the impact of climate change accelerates, determining a building’s carbon footprint—the amount of CO2 it generates from construction to operation to, potentially, demolition—has become essential. But doing so is not easy. Many firms cobble together dispersed, highly technical software and calculators from around the industry. Autodesk, arguably the biggest name in architectural software (with more than 100 million users and yearly revenue over $5 billion, according to its figures), has helped change that.

In April 2024, it introduced a new dashboard called Total Carbon Analysis for Architects in Autodesk Forma, its year-old cloud-based software focused on predesign and schematic design. It also incorporated embodied carbon analysis into Autodesk Insight, an energy modeling tool built to work with its Autodesk Revit building information modeling software. Both tools provide dashboards to evaluate both embodied carbon (greenhouse gas emissions generated during the production, transportation, and construction of a building’s materials) and operational carbon (emissions from energy consumption during a building’s operations, like heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting.)

The tools dramatically simplify the process of carbon measurement and allow firms to start tracking carbon usage well before they typically do, allowing them to be far more proactive at improving overall sustainability. Since Total Carbon for Architects was announced in April 2024, it has been used by customers to assess more than 59 billion kg of carbon on their projects, according to Autodesk.

5. MAD Architects

For changing how nature and architecture can coexist

Beijing-based MAD Architects, one of China’s most prominent design firms, excels at integrating nature, architecture, and urban design. But this year, it’s pushed the boundaries of what it means to connect nature and the built environment through two stunning projects: the Jiaxing Train Station in Jiaxing, China, and One River North, a mixed-use apartment building in downtown Denver.

In Jiaxing, the firm created what it calls a “train station in the forest,” consisting of a new station building (a re-creation of a historic structure that had long been lost), large planted plazas to the north and south, and the renovation of the surrounding People’s Park. The firm placed most of the new station’s program and infrastructure underground to free up space for plantings and public space—in all, 1,500 trees were planted across the site. Benefits include enhanced habitat biodiversity, well-being, air quality, climate regulation, carbon sequestration, stormwater management, and a commercial resurgence in the area. The station’s floating roof, equipped with solar panels, powers the station sustainably, producing about 1.1 million kilowatt-hours of energy annually.

In Denver, the 16-story, 187-unit One River North apartment building features a carved, canyonlike outdoor atrium inspired by local natural topography and filled with greenery, waterfalls, and terraces, creating a vertical landscape within the city. Residents can connect with nature in an environment that feels like a hike through the mountains. The project provides a valuable case study for how to densify without sacrificing quality of life. It’s also imbedded with local fauna, increasing local habitat biodiversity, reducing heat absorption, and contributing to stormwater management.

6. ODA

For transforming a parking garage into a beguiling work of architecture

In Buenos Aires, a once-decrepit parking garage is now a gleaming mixed-used office building. The transformation is the work of ODA, a New York City architecture firm known for its boundary-pushing work. The building, Paseo Gigena, sits on the edge of a large park in Buenos Aires. The formerly decaying multilevel parking garage now contains restaurants, retail, and a sprawling series of open-air gathering spaces. The firm reused about 80% of the original structure to create 160,000 square feet of office space wrapped in a curving glass facade that mirrors the green surroundings while opening up to views and natural light.

The building’s unusual shape was determined largely by how the public would experience it. In addition to a private terrace for workers, the building’s ramped public walkways stretch up from the street to the building’s roof and then curve back down to the El Rosedal de Palermo park on the other side. In effect, they act as an extension of the park itself, providing unique experiences for the public while activating the building and the neighborhood—drawing in new visitors and tenants alike.

The project’s public spaces have not yet opened, but 100% of the building’s retail and 80% of its office spaces have already been leased. The concept of energizing areas through unique building reuse and the blending of public and private spaces is a core part of ODA’s work. Currently the firm is completing POST Rotterdam, a mixed-use hub of hospitality, residences, retail, and public spaces in and around a former post office in the center of Rotterdam.

7. Gensler

For making it easy to choose more sustainable building materials

Gensler is one of the largest architecture firms in the world, with more than 7,000 employees, 50 offices, and $1.8 billion in revenue. Its innovations can have seismic impacts. The Gensler Product Sustainability Standards (GPS), introduced in 2023 and rolled out firm-wide in 2024, give the architecture and design industry a unified way to measure the carbon impact of the interior products it selects.

Firms previously had to wade through more than 100 certifications and eco-labels and consider more than 650 eco-related factors, such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), global-warming potential, ingredient disclosure, manufacturing location, end-of-life options, and indoor air impacts. GPS—developed with input from third-party organizations like the Carbon Leadership Forum, Mindful Materials, and the U.S. Green Building Council—is an open-source tool that gives designers, manufacturers, and clients a data-backed road map on specification, prioritizing sustainability and health.

In 2024, Gensler expanded GPS from 12 to 20 product categories, with a focus on high-volume materials like acoustic ceiling tiles, carpet tiles, and resilient flooring. More than 2,800 products have been vetted for GPS compliance, and more than 1,500 Gensler designers and 1,000 third-party manufacturers have trained to employ GPS standards. Gensler estimates that use of GPS has the power to offset up to 341,000 metric tons of carbon annually.

8. DLR Group

For adapting adaptive reuse to unusual buildings

As our cities age and our ecological crises intensify, building reuse has become the most common—and sustainable—category of architecture. Between 50% and 75% percent of a building’s embedded carbon is contained in its foundation, structure, and building envelope. But there is much more potential to be tapped beyond the familiar conversion of industrial spaces and historic offices.

Omaha-based architecture firm DLR Group is widening the scope of creative reuse, tackling an unusually diverse range of projects and scales with its extensive in-house expertise. Since reuse can pose significant challenges in areas like engineering, life safety, and systems upgrades, DLR’s ability to address all at once is a major advantage. As a result, it has retrofitted an impressive breadth of buildings, including malls, big box stores, strip malls, offices, hospitals, libraries, post offices, and even jails.

Its recent work includes transforming a department store in Boulder, Colorado, into a biotech hub for the diagnostic solutions company Biodesix (2024) and converting a former probation office in Whittier, California, into the Greater Whittier LGBTQ+ Community Center (2024).

For the Biodesix office, the firm revamped insufficient mechanical systems and cut into the building envelope to let natural daylight penetrate deep into the interior. In Whittier, it installed interior partition walls, colorful finishes, and new electrical and mechanical systems. DLR Group’s upcoming conversion of a department store into the Albany Museum of Art, meanwhile, will avoid about 65% of the embodied carbon emissions (in this case, about 1,600 metric tons) of a new building.

9. Diamond Schmitt

For turning buildings into solar panels

Renowned Canadian architecture firm Diamond Schmitt is pioneering the use of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) cladding in North America. BIPV, which incorporates photovoltaic cells into surfaces like concrete, glass, or stone, is common in Europe but has been slow to catch on in North America. Diamond Schmitt advocates for the technology as an easy-to-install, essential tool in the push toward net zero buildings across the continent.

The year-old Innovation Village at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, serves as the most vibrant case study for Diamond Schmitt’s approach. The 95,000-square-foot space, designed to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, features a custom panelized, staggered opaque-glass BIPV cladding, ranging from 120W to 470W per pane and generating an estimated 18% of the building’s power requirements. The panels’ efficiency is similar to that of typical solar cells, but since they are imbedded into the facade, they can provide more usable surface area.

Diamond Schmitt now has more than half a dozen BIPV projects in the works across Canada, and it both promotes BIPV and helps shape its incentives and regulations. The firm works with Canadian cities, educational institutions, the Canadian Green Building Council (CAGBC), and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada to increase BIPV usage via presentations, conferences, awards, and marketing. And it collaborated with CAGBC to model energy requirements and performance opportunities for BIPV buildings. The result: buildings that effectively function as their own solar panel.

10. Gresham Smith

For quantifying the built environment and then improving on it

Nashville-based design, planning, and engineering consultancy Gresham Smith‘s new Empathic Insights platform, MPATH, quantifies and analyzes how people feel in built environments via changes in heart rate collected by modern wearables or Bluetooth heart straps. The firm uses these insights to test and then improve designs of buildings, public spaces, and urban infrastructure.

The firm recently deployed MPATH with the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, identifying high-stress locations like intersections, alleys, and parking lots. Guided by the data, the city enhanced focus areas with elements like bikeway protection, improved way finding, and green-painted bike lanes. The firm then rerecorded MPATH data, which showed almost across-the-board improvements to people’s sense of comfort and safety.

Gresham Smith also collaborated with students at the University of Louisville to study the impacts of diverse urban conditions in the city, including green spaces, street trees, sky views, curb ramps, blank walls, private drives, and street furniture. That effort layered in data gathered by external sensors measuring the impacts of external stressors like lighting, humidity, and temperature. The results of that study—which are being shared with architects, engineers, urban planners, and policymakers in a white paper—are intended to help guide more informed architecture and urban design in the future.

Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.