Graduate Engineer Tungsten Tang reflects on some of the key themes he noted at the 2026 IABSE Future of Design conference held at the University of Cambridge:

Structural engineers often hear two voices in our heads: the understanding that every site is unique and structural components are usually bespoke, clashing with the urge to rationalise our designs to enable a unifying philosophy and economies of scale within, and perhaps across, projects. This theme of marrying individuality and scale in our designs was one I particularly noted throughout the day.

Demo less, test more

Almost three quarters of DMag’s projects in 2025 involved reusing and extending existing structures, while retaining as much of the existing as possible – up to 89% in some cases.

Compared with other types of engineering, structural engineers are inherently less familiar with prototyping — most buildings are only constructed once! We may, however, have an antidote: to test and back up our design with experimental data, or to use a lower-risk, lower complexity counterpart to validate our designs before upscaling.

This was encapsulated in Anna Wendt’s (Buro Happold) presentation on façade engineering, where she described her personal journey, starting from an extruded aluminium façade for a shopping wall car park with standard cylindrical geometry. It turned out that the research done into the material’s properties and underlying design principles could be reapplied and expanded upon when designing the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where panels are near-bespoke with complex geometries. As an early-career engineer myself, it makes me wonder which of the solutions I am currently working on might be able to be repurposed in bigger contexts in the future.

Perhaps we as engineers should ask ourselves: are we as good as interpreting test statistics as we ought to be? In limited scenarios, shortcut tools are available: for example, codified factors allow conservatism to be reduced on the material factor of concrete if its in-situ strength has been core-tested. Yet typically, we need to start from first principles — understanding probability distributions and statistical certainty and converting them to design parameters.

Given a natural material like bamboo, and applying intricate processes such as heat treatment or mechanical bending, as in Chris Matthews’ (Atelier One) presentation, can we be certain of its short-term and long-term performance? If a demolished building is reused as rubble masonry (such as in a project I am working on now, Meadow Barn), how much testing is sufficient to convert into a sensible material factor in limit state design? Can we assess how an existing foundation would react to increased loading by investigating already-occurred ground movement?

Interface of structural engineering with the wider engineering world

Understanding the role of the designed structure in context can lead to unexpected optimisations. In designing the temporary opening ceremony stage structure for the 2012 London Olympics, Chris Matthews considered, among many other loads, the mass of shy horses and cloud set pieces flown on gantry tracks. The clouds’ movements are dictated precisely by control systems, in turn coded to prevent load concentration in each bay between primary beams.

Likewise, we can be much better structural engineers if we understand how other branches of engineering are involved in our structures’ cradle-to-gate life cycle. With increasing use of computer-integrated manufacturing, understanding manufacturing process and tooling paths enables complex geometries, especially when it comes to connection types which traditionally would be difficult to achieve.

The bottom line

Aside from the throwback to time spent in the lecture rooms of my alma mater, the conference was an important reminder that a paradigm shift is required to enable future-proof construction. Engineers should be equipped to engage more directly with what the site, the materials and the usage requirements are—instead of pulling designs out of a black-box of conservative assumptions. All that, such that every bit of new structure that moves from sketch to site occurs for a good reason.