The bottom line
A potential share of architectural opportunity is moving upstream. Firms are winning work through program strategy, systems planning, standards guidance, reuse intelligence, and pre-design simulation before a project becomes a resolved building. AECOM’s STEP fusion role is framed around design and technical services inside a long-horizon energy program, Stantec’s Scottish Water appointment around utility transformation and asset-scale delivery, and Perkins&Will’s Oxford Debenhams conversion around a repeatable conversion offer rather than a one-off reuse job.
At first glance, it might seem like firms are abandoning design for consultancy, but what is really happening is that they are widening the portion of the process they can influence and bill for. A firm that helps define feasibility, phasing, technical constraints, reuse potential, or systems logic gets paid earlier, broadens its service range, and improves its odds of staying engaged when the formal design phase begins. That outcome is not guaranteed, especially in unbundled procurements, but upstream involvement clearly strengthens influence before the brief hardens. Germany’s current “phase-zero” infrastructure guidance makes that logic explicit by pushing cost, structural, and environmental exploration ahead of fixed geometry.
The mechanism
The shift is being driven by projects that are harder to define early with confidence. Infrastructure, utility transition, adaptive reuse, and retrofit all carry more unknowns before form can safely settle. In that environment, valuable work often sits ahead of the drawing set: option testing, systems planning, funding logic, standards interpretation, technical due diligence, and scenario modeling. The Baukultur report’s phase-zero framing and TUM’s heat-demand retrofit modeling work both point in that direction.
At the same time, firms are reorganizing around earlier and broader roles. AECOM’s Hong Kong nature-based solutions guidance work sits upstream of individual projects and shapes future ones. The common thread is simple: more decisive work is happening before geometry becomes the main event.
Market signals
AECOM: fusion work moves value into program-scale technical coordination
AECOM’s March 17 announcement on the UK’s STEP fusion program describes design and technical services within the first three-year, £200 million tranche of a wider program with future opportunities valued up to £10 billion. That is upstream work in a highly technical energy setting, not a conventional building-only scope.
Read more about AECOM’s STEP role here.
Stantec: Utility transformation is becoming a design market of its own
Stantec’s preferred-bidder status for Scottish Water’s multibillion-pound transformation program points to a long-cycle model built around design, engineering, program management, and asset transition. This is upstream influence at the infrastructure scale.
Read more about Stantec’s Scottish Water role here.
AECOM: standards work is turning into a repeatable advisory scope
AECOM’s support for Hong Kong’s first comprehensive nature-based solutions guidelines shows firms moving into policy and framework work before individual projects arrive. Guidance writing is becoming a route to influence future projects.
Read more about the Hong Kong guidelines here.
Perkins&Will: adaptive reuse is being packaged as a repeatable service line
Perkins&Will’s Oxford Debenhams transformation is framed as a specialized conversion offer for science-sector tenants and regeneration clients. The reusable value sits in the intelligence around conversion as much as in the building itself.
Read more about the Oxford project here.
Germany: “phase zero” is being formalized, not treated as a soft prelude
Germany’s current Baukultur report calls for a careful pre-planning phase for infrastructure and directly calls for focusing on “phase zero” before downstream planning locks in cost, technical, and environmental consequences.
Read more about the Baukultur report here.
Intelligence brief
The key shift this week is not that early design is the only thing that matters, but that firms are discovering real scope, revenue, and leverage before the project settles into its final form. AECOM, Stantec, and Perkins&Will all indicate the same trend: projects are increasingly shaped in the phase where options are filtered, systems are mapped, technical risks are assessed, and future pathways are narrowed. Germany’s phase-zero language supports this pattern from a technical perspective.
For practical purposes, the main point is straightforward. Upstream work should not replace design but should instead expand engagement across more parts of the process. A firm that can define feasibility, reuse logic, systems strategy, phasing, and technical constraints before the brief is finalized can secure earlier involvement, deepen client trust, and increase its chances of remaining involved once formal design starts. Sometimes, another firm will still end up doing the design. That remains a real risk. The more lasting lesson is that scope is now being secured earlier than many offices are set up to handle.
See you next week!
-Johan