HDR

About HDR

HDR is a 100% employee-owned global professional services firm specialising in architecture, engineering, environmental and construction services. Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, the company employs more than 15,000 people working from over 200 offices in 15 countries, and has been in practice for more than a century.

The firm is best known for high-performance buildings and smart infrastructure, but describes its multidisciplinary teams as including scientists, economists, builders, analysts and artists alongside architects and engineers - a breadth that lets it advise on questions well before a project takes physical form.

Employee Ownership

Complete employee ownership is central to HDR's identity. Staff-owners have a direct stake in long-term performance rather than in quarterly returns to outside shareholders, which tends to favour patient investment in expertise and client relationships. It also aids retention in a sector where senior technical staff are scarce and heavily recruited.

Markets Served

HDR works across seventeen markets, an unusually wide span even among large multidisciplinary firms.

• Health - acute and ambulatory care, cancer centres, paediatrics, behavioural health and translational health sciences
• Transportation - aviation, transit, highways, freight rail, ports and maritime
• Water - drinking water, wastewater, conveyance, fisheries and water resource management
• Science - laboratories, cleanrooms, containment facilities, vivaria and life sciences
• Power - generation, renewable energy, transmission and distribution
• Civic and justice - government buildings and courts
• Education - K-12 schools and higher education
• Defense and intelligence - installations and mission-critical security
• Industrial - advanced manufacturing, mining, agribusiness, oil, gas and chemicals
• Technology and data - data centres and semiconductor facilities
• Urban and community development - community design, parks and transit-oriented development
• Waste, commercial real estate, hospitality, culture, finance and aerospace

Services

Alongside architecture and engineering, HDR offers asset management, commissioning and operations, coastal engineering and restoration, economics and finance, environmental sciences, planning and consulting, program management, project delivery, research, right of way, and sustainability and resilience.

The economics and finance capability is worth noting. Major public infrastructure rarely fails on engineering grounds - it fails on funding, benefit-cost analysis and political case-making, and having those skills in-house lets HDR support clients through approval as well as design.

Values

Five stated values guide the practice: live the network, thinking globally while acting locally; listen first, on the basis that understanding a problem's root precedes solving it; hold ourselves accountable; push boundaries; and design smart, tailoring the approach to each situation rather than applying a standard method.

Corporate Sustainability and the HDR Foundation

The firm publishes corporate sustainability commitments and operates the HDR Foundation, a philanthropic arm making grants in the communities where its people live and work.

Market Position

HDR ranks among the largest architecture-engineering firms in the United States and competes globally, particularly in healthcare, transportation and water. Its combination of scale, employee ownership and market breadth gives it unusual stability across economic cycles.

Why AEC Teams Should Know HDR

For owners and consultants planning hospitals, transit systems, water infrastructure or research facilities, HDR is one of the most significant multidisciplinary firms to understand in the built environment.