Arup

About Arup

Arup is a global consultancy of designers, engineers, planners and technical specialists working across the built and natural environments. The practice was founded in London in 1946 by Ove Arup as a consulting engineering firm, and has grown into an international business that guides, plans and designs infrastructure and buildings worldwide.

What distinguishes Arup structurally is its ownership. Following Ove Arup's 1970 Key Speech, in which he set out the aims and principles of the firm, the business transitioned to a trust-based form of employee ownership. There are no external shareholders, which the firm credits with allowing it to prioritise long-term technical quality and social purpose over short-term returns.

Services

Arup organises more than 140 distinct service offerings into six broad groups:

• Engineering and technical services – structural, civil, geotechnical, bridge, facade and building services (MEP) engineering, acoustics, building physics, fire, seismic and wind engineering.
• Design – architecture, lighting, audio-visual systems and specialist design disciplines.
• Advisory services – programme and project management, management and strategy consulting, asset management, economics and policy, and commercial and ESG due diligence.
• Climate and sustainability consulting – decarbonisation strategy, circular economy, building retrofit, climate risk and resilience.
• Planning – masterplanning, airport planning, area energy planning and urban development strategy.
• Digital – Building Information Modelling, computational design and proprietary software tools.

Markets Served

Arup works across aviation, rail, roads and streets, maritime and wider transport; energy, water and resources; property, cities, education, healthcare, science, sport, and arts and culture; and industry, manufacturing and data centres. That spread lets the firm move techniques between sectors, applying, for example, computational analysis developed for long-span structures to energy infrastructure or transport hubs.

Landmark Projects

Buildings and Structures

Arup's reputation was built on making difficult buildings possible. Early work included Dublin's Busaras bus station, a landmark of Irish modernism. Collaboration with a new generation of architects including Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano produced the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Work with OMA on CCTV Beijing delivered a building form that reshaped assumptions about high-rise design. In Barcelona, Arup combines computational design with traditional masonry to help complete Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.

Infrastructure

Major infrastructure includes the Oresund Link between Denmark and Sweden, the United Kingdom's first high-speed rail line connecting London to Europe via the Channel Tunnel, the Elizabeth Line in London, and the first phase of New York's Second Avenue Subway. In Hong Kong, the Kai Tak development demonstrates the firm's city-scale regeneration work.

Climate, Energy and Water

Recent work reflects a shift toward resilience and the energy transition: enabling 714MW of offshore wind at East Anglia One, the Western Star floating offshore wind farm, the Shanghai urban drainage masterplan, a citywide impervious area study strengthening New York City's flood resilience, and post-disaster reconstruction in Peru following the 2017 El Nino impacts.

Digital Tools and Research

Arup develops its own software rather than relying solely on commercial platforms. Fuse provides geographic information and spatial analysis configurable to a project team's needs. UHeat uses satellite imagery to identify buildings and structures driving urban temperature rise. Neuron brings built-environment insight together with emerging digital technologies in a single platform. WeatherShift supplies future climate data in standardised formats that engineers and architects can use directly.

Research and knowledge-sharing run through Arup University, which works with clients, partners and staff to raise technical standards, a strategic foresight practice that maps forces shaping possible futures for multilateral agencies and global companies, and Arup Ventures, which backs early-stage companies working on a sustainable built environment.

Values and Sustainability Commitments

Six values set out by Ove Arup continue to guide the firm: social usefulness, a humane organisation, straight and honourable dealings, reasonable prosperity, quality of work, and Total Architecture. That last idea, that all relevant design decisions should be considered together and integrated by an empowered multidisciplinary team, remains the clearest statement of how Arup approaches projects. On sustainability, the firm has committed to a global decarbonisation strategy targeting net zero by 2040.

Why Arup Matters to the AEC Industry

For architects, engineers and clients, Arup is a reference point for integrated design practice. Its engineers have enabled some of the most technically demanding buildings of the last seventy years, and its structure as an employee-owned trust makes it an unusual case study in how ownership shapes professional priorities. For teams evaluating digital delivery or climate-adaptation strategy, Arup's published tools, research and project record offer a well-documented body of precedent.