The most innovative architecture companies of 2026

Beyond the not insignificant work of designing buildings, it can often seem that architects are also tasked with solving some of the biggest problems in the world. From reducing the environmental impact of buildings to increasing access to affordable spaces to fighting climate change to rebuilding what climate change has damaged, the architect’s work can verge on the infinite.

For the architecture companies honored in Fast Company’s 2026 Most Innovative Companies awards, this mission creep is part of the appeal. All 10 honorees on this year’s architecture list have made societal challenges and systems-scale shortcomings into side projects of their more straightforward architectural design work.

For example, the global design firm HKS earned the top spot on this year’s list partly because it did not shy away from a bold request from a client for a skyscraper design that could be both the tallest building in Salt Lake City and help reduce the city’s notoriously poor air quality. HKS came up with a unique approach to filtering the air going into the building and ventilating it back out cleaner than before.

Others on the list have taken similarly expansive views of their responsibilities working in the built environment. The architecture firm NBBJ is using neuroscientific findings to inform the way it designs buildings that reduce the negative cognitive effects of high heat environments. Crest Real Estate has applied its forte in construction-permit expediting to assist in the rebuilding of fire-ravaged Los Angeles. And Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is taking an incubator approach to supporting next-generation building materials that will improve the energy performance of the buildings it designs, as well as those designed by others.

The list is replete with design firms and architecture industry specialists that see the complexity of today’s big issues as a call to action, and they’re using their work as a way of getting more than a building built. Their designs and, by extension, the world will be better as a result.

1. HKS

For designing a precedent-setting 41-story tower in Salt Lake City that filters air

Salt Lake City’s new skyscraper is also a sky cleaner. Astra Tower, the 451-foot-tall luxury residential building that opened in 2025, was designed by HKS Architects to reckon with one of the biggest challenges facing Salt Lake City: poor air quality. Due to its geographic location in the valley of a ring of mountain ranges, Salt Lake City suffers the choking effects of what’s known as an inversion layer. Cold air forms a kind of cap at the ridge of the mountaintops, effectively trapping polluted urban air in the bowl of the city and pushing the air quality index to unhealthy levels. “You can see it. You can smell it,” says architect Emir Tursic, a partner at HKS and a Salt Lake City resident.

Astra Tower’s developer called on the architects to propose a solution. The request “left us scratching our heads for a little bit,” says Tursic. “How can one building do anything about something that is of this magnitude?”

Pulling on expertise from across its 29 offices, HKS took an unusual approach. Astra Tower was designed with a single entry point for its air, which is then passed through a hospital-grade filtration system before being delivered through special ducts directly to each of the building’s 372 units. When that heavily filtered air goes back out of the building, through vents or residents’ windows, it is far cleaner than when it came in. Tursic says it’s a model nearly any other building could follow.

Residents can see just how good their air quality is with built-in air monitors in every unit. And the air quality education extends out to the city itself. At the top of Astra Tower, now the city’s tallest building, live data from the EPA and NOAA feed color-coded LED lighting to indicate the current air quality. One building can’t clean up an entire city’s air, but Astra Tower is certainly trying.

Read more about HKS, No. 31 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026.

2. NBBJ

For creating design interventions that lower indoor temperatures—improving worker cognition in the process

Extreme heat is one of the main ways people around the world will experience climate change firsthand, but it will mean more than physical discomfort. Research shows that extreme heat can also affect a person’s mental well-being, reducing cognition, disrupting focus, and impairing emotional regulation. In workplaces, these effects can be bad for workers and bad for business.

The global architecture firm NBBJ is actively designing workplace projects to reduce these negative effects. The firm has partnered with neuroscientist Dr. John Medina to reduce the impact of heat on building users, including for blue-collar workers and the most vulnerable populations.

NBBJ has produced designs for projects in Seattle and Singapore that lower heat inside the buildings, creating more comfortable settings for workers in those spaces. A cross-ventilated design for Seattle’s Ferry Terminal eliminates the need for air-conditioning completely. The commercial tower Keppel South Central NBBJ designed in Singapore uses a special wall design that cuts heat by 40%. Other research is exploring the development of new sustainable materials that can greatly reduce heat gain on building exteriors. It’s climate-conscious design that puts peoples’ experience top of mind.

3. Digs

For making collaboration easier for architects, builders, and clients by turning static floor plans into interactive 3D models

A house’s blueprints are the raw information of the building, containing everything a designer or builder needs to know about how it’s made and how to fix it. For the end user of the building—the homeowner—this raw information can be virtually impenetrable, offering little information that a typical person would find useful or actionable.

Digs, a software company focused on the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, has decoded the blueprint. Its technology makes the often 2D and static building blueprints of the past into an interactive interface and visual workspace where designers, builders, and homeowners can seamlessly collaborate on 3D versions of a project. They can work together, in an easily digestible way, to understand a building from its earliest design stages to its construction to its ongoing maintenance post-occupancy.

Other tools in the company’s portfolio easily scan and process building interiors, including room measurements, building material types, and appliances and products, easing communications about a project’s design and making the operation and maintenance of a building easier to manage. By giving builders, tradespeople, and homeowners a real-time and shared visual hub, decision-making and communication are faster during the design and construction process, and maintenance during the lifespan of a building is more intuitive for the people who use it every day.

4. Gresham Smith

For speeding up decision-making through AI tools that visualize projects and improve design

​​As the creative and operational benefits of artificial intelligence have rippled across the design industry, architecture firm Gresham Smith took a moment in 2025 to try to understand what impact this technology could have on the way it does business. Through a deep data analysis that looked into every part of its operation, the firm drew baselines for the way it has commonly worked. Then it saw how adding a layer of AI could improve, sometimes vastly, those outcomes.

As a result, Gresham Smith developed five AI-infused platforms that reinvent how it approaches projects, clients, and the future of architecture. A portal for building information models has reduced decision-making time by 40%. An automated spatial planning tool takes early project parameters to automate general building plans, creating a viable starting place for design that reduces time by 25%. 

An AI assistant processes client planning meetings to create actionable design directions for designers to work toward, streamlining the process of turning client desires into buildable projects. One tool uses AI visualizations to speed up concept design, and another analyzes the emotional responses spatial designs trigger. All together, these tools bring new technologies to bear on the everyday parts of architectural design. For Gresham Smith, they are rewriting how an architecture firm works.

5. Crest Real Estate

For launching a catalog of fire-resistant home designs to help Los Angeles recover from devastating wildfires

As construction-permit expediters and third-generation Angelenos, brothers Steven and Jason Somers took the January 2025 wildfires that devastated the Los Angeles area personally. Through their company, Crest Real Estate, they set out to use their professional skills to help in the rebuilding process.

Taking a page from the Case Study House Program that led to famous modernist home designs across Southern California, Crest created Case Study 2.0, a portfolio of model home designs that could aid the rebuilding in L.A. They brought on more than 40 local architecture firms to offer deeply discounted fire-resistant home designs that people can use to rebuild their fire-damaged homes. The designs are optimized for the average lot sizes of homes destroyed in the fire and informed by Crest’s permit-expediting experience to qualify for building permits as quickly as possible.

As of early 2026, more than a dozen homeowners are currently using Case Study 2.0 designs in their rebuild projects. At least two of those are already moving into construction, and Crest expects roughly 20 other projects to be in various stages of development within the first half of 2026. As model designs intended to be replicated with few if any major changes, these projects are also speeding up the permitting process for future versions of those designs, making it more feasible for many homeowners to rebuild faster and cheaper.

6. Cove

For showing that an AI-native architecture firm can improve the efficiency of designing buildings—and actually get them built

Cove has gone far beyond other architecture firms in making AI the center of its design approach. Founded by two architects inspired by the idea of expanding access to good design, Cove has been early to embrace the power of AI to speed up the pace and bring down the cost of architectural design.

Cove integrates AI in every stage of an architecture project, from feasibility and design through construction administration. The firm’s proprietary AI tools evaluate project designs for factors including local permit requirements, daylight access, carbon emissions, and overall cost. Other tools automate the creation of construction documents, further shortening timelines.

Several of the firm’s projects have been permitted, including a 16-unit townhouse project in Atlanta that’s now under construction. Other projects in the works range widely, from housing to data centers to hospitality projects, showing the versatility of their AI-centric approach. The firm’s AI tools greatly accelerate project feasibility studies and permitting, trimming months off projects and lowering overall budgets. But the company is not just handing over the reins to AI. Automating these time-consuming and often rote processes frees up more time for human designers to refine projects, improving aesthetics while taking advantage of the time and cost savings AI makes possible.

7. Dialog

For creating safer wildlife crossings over deadly highways by blending biological sciences and design

Grim data informed the design of the Peter Lougheed Wildlife Overpass outside Banff, Alberta, where the migration routes of deer, elk, coyotes, and grizzly bears collide quite literally with road traffic. Vehicle-animal collisions occur an average of 69 times per year, and that’s only what gets officially reported. Dialog, an architecture and engineering firm with offices across Canada, was tasked with designing a wildlife overpass for this busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that would help reduce some of these collisions.

Wildlife overpasses are nothing new, but Dialog took a different approach with its design. By bringing wildlife biologists and ecologists into the early stages of the design process, and involving them throughout the project’s construction, the architects created a wildlife crossing with a physical form and sight lines that better accommodate the lifestyles and migration patterns of the various species known to travel this area.

The project has already reduced vehicle-wildlife collisions. According to a before-and-after study, collisions are down by more than 80% since the crossing officially opened in June 2025. The science-backed design process is now being replicated on six more Dialog-designed wildlife crossings in other parts of Alberta.

8. Autodesk

For creating a comprehensive digital twin to aid restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist masterpiece Fallingwater

Cantilevered over the gentle waterfalls of a small stream in Southwest Pennsylvania, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is one of the most famous examples of modernist residential architecture in the United States. But, like any other 90-year-old house, the building has needed some extra help to stay in good shape. 

To aid in a recent historic restoration of the building, the architecture and engineering software company Autodesk developed a comprehensive digital twin of the project. This digitized approach streamlined the building’s restoration timeline, increased the historical accuracy of restoration efforts, reduced material waste, and better managed the construction sequencing, making the project faster and cheaper overall.

This work builds on lessons Autodesk learned from creating and donating a similar and detailed 3D model of Notre-Dame Cathedral after its 2019 fire. That model accelerated the restoration process for Notre-Dame, enabling a highly complex and closely watched project to be completed within five years. That success and the work at Fallingwater has boosted demand for Autodesk’s digital twin technology, particularly among preservationists and others engaged in historic restoration projects.

9. CannonDesign

For investing in a “smart buildings” practice

The global architecture and design firm CannonDesign sees “smart design” as the future of the industry. Packed with technology and optimized to function in the most efficient and environmentally sustainable manner possible, smart buildings have gone from green niche to the architectural mainstream. As one of the larger architecture firms designing projects around the world, CannonDesign is helping make smart buildings and smart design more of the status quo.

In 2025, the 19-office firm reframed its business approach to emphasize building designs and post-occupancy management strategies that rely heavily on AI and smart-building technology to improve environmental sustainability. The firm also invested millions into this effort by acquiring smart-building expert firm the Clarient Group, and an in-house innovation incubator has partnered with this new smart-buildings team to identify ideas for smart-building projects, influencing design concepts from the earliest stages. 

Combining the firm’s existing expertise in sustainable buildings design—CannonDesign’s portfolio includes 312 LEED-certified buildings, 14 net-zero energy projects, and five net-zero-carbon projects—it will use this smart-building focus to improve the operational efficiency and material performance of its projects. It’s not just an experiment. CannonDesign is now making the smart-buildings approach part of the way it designs all buildings going forward.

10. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

For incubating the innovation ecosystem around architecture and construction

As one of the more venerable firms in American and corporate architecture, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has had a solid run of designing some of the most significant skyscrapers of the 20th and 21st centuries. From Chicago’s Willis Tower to New York’s 7 World Trade Center to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the firm has reshaped skylines around the world. Now it’s hoping to reshape the materials those skylines are built from.

In 2025, SOM launched a new approach to improving access to novel building materials and design tools through a business incubation program and a venture-like seed funding program. Using its experience and scale, the firm is trying to jump-start the businesses and suppliers that are providing the smart and sustainable building materials of the future.

This is taking various forms. The firm has seed-funded a new venture that implements clean energy storage technology in skyscrapers, essentially turning towers into batteries. The firm has also formed a new partnership with an established business incubator to spur more innovation specifically directed at the fields of architecture, construction, and engineering. These investments, and others in the works, could radically redefine the buildings that make up city skylines.

Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.