21st Century Construction

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

For a brief time after the catastrophe that claimed 2,977 innocent lives, public feeling soured on skyscrapers as unsafe and uniquely vulnerable to attack.

More recently, supertall glazed towers have been criticised as unsustainable as temperatures rise to new extremes.

In our latest episode, two prominent and leading proponents of tall have their say.

Structural engineer Kamran Moazami is Executive Design Principal, Property & Buildings, UK & Ireland for WSP. His credits include The Shard, 22 Bishopsgate and One Blackfriars.

Building services engineer Nick Offer is WSP's Head of Advisory Services for Property & Buildings, UK & Ireland. His credits include The Shard, 22 Bishopsgate and the Olympic Village.

In a fascinating discussion including Construction Management editor Will Mann, we probe how 9/11 changed tall-building design, the emerging strategies for building tall in a hotter world, and why, according to Moazami, “tall is the answer” when it comes to effective land use and urban development.

Plant trees down high streets. Retrofit schools, hospitals and care homes with external shading. Cool down beds and install ceiling fans. Legislate for minimum indoor temperatures. Ban glass towers. Paint roofs white. Set up a cooling refuge in every community. Reduce glazing and install windows that open.

These are just some of the measures discussed by our panel of leading experts on climate and the built environment in this month’s 21CC podcast, convened to brainstorm what we can do, starting right now, to make towns and cities safe and liveable even as the long-predicted, human-caused warming intensifies.

Chairing this brisk and purposeful discussion is Saul Humphrey FCIOB, this year’s president of the Chartered Institute of Building: an industry veteran and professor of sustainable construction management at Anglia Ruskin University.

Giving us their insights are:

Dr Arash Beizaee, senior lecturer in building energy at Loughborough University, an expert on thermal comfort, overheating and health in buildings who is developing practical, low-energy interventions to safeguard wellbeing;

Dr Macarena Cardenas, senior advisor for resilience and nature at the UK Green Building Council and leader of industry-scale programmes across the built environment;

Dr Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University and recipient of a Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship for her Extreme Futures project improving how we forecast flash floods and prolonged storms more accurately;

Dr Susan Roaf, emeritus professor of architectural engineering at Heriot Watt University and co-author of Adaptive Thermal Comfort: At the Extremes (Routledge, 2026), which calls for a revolution among building designers, owners, managers, and occupants to prepare for the future that is upon us;

Jordan Turner, senior lecturer at the University of the Built Environment.





The future is here; there’s no time to lose.

For the last three years, DragonHeart Homes, a CIOB company in Peterborough that makes modular units for public-sector housing, has employed prisoners from HMP North Sea Camp, a Category-D open men’s prison outside Boston in Lincolnshire.

So far, 41 inmates have come to work at DragonHeart. They get training and NVQs in construction skills, with CSCS cards.

It sets them up with cash in the bank and, upon their release, skills and experience the construction industry is crying out for.

DragonHeart is the largest employer in a government scheme called Prisoners Building Homes, which unlocks public land for modular housing developments and helps prisoners get work with the builders.

Some of the inmates have stayed with DragonHeart after their release, while others have gone to work at other companies in the scheme.

Six months after their release, most are in full employment and almost none have re-offended.

For this podcast, Global Construction Review editor Rod Sweet went to Peterborough to sit down with two men who’ve come through the DragonHeart programme.

One came back to work with the company after his release. Now 57, he’s been in prison for most of his adult life.

The other, still in prison, has accepted a permanent job offer from the company after his release in six weeks.

In candid conversations, both men say the experience has changed their lives. They’re proud of their new skills, proud to be looking after themselves and their families, and they love their jobs.

The man driving the outreach is DragonHeart director Jason Bassett MCIOB. He says the prisoners are reliable, productive workers who are eager to learn. He explains how the scheme works.

We also hear from Cheshire Police & Crime Commissioner Dan Price, who is on a mission to bring the Prisoners Building Homes scheme to Cheshire.

The end of April saw two major announcements regarding humanoid robots, a technology the construction sector hopes can work with the human workforce to improve productivity.

Firstly, Tilbury Douglas announced onsite trials of its own humanoid robot, Douglas, a walking (not yet talking) robot that aims to spot defects and safety issues alongside site managers. Here, in the latest episode of the 21cc podcast, we speak to Mark Buckle, TD’s technical director, who tells us about the challenges he faced bringing Douglas to a potentially cynical workforce.

In the same week TD announced its site trials, CM attended the launch of 'Leo', a humanoid construction robot designed to carry out various site tasks that will be mass-produced as a service from 2030. Leo is the vision of IBE Humanoids Founder Vassos Chrysostomou, who we also hear from in the podcast, where he tells the gathered audience that the robot "will augment, rather than replace human judgement, skill and responsibility."

Listen now to see if construction is on the cusp of solving its productivity dilemma.

The government’s £15bn Warm Homes Plan, launched in January, is aimed at upgrading the nation’s homes and cutting energy bills.

By 2030, it is expected to upgrade five million homes as part of a comprehensive retrofit programme, focusing on targeted interventions through insulation, solar panels and heat pumps.

For contractors and housing providers, the scale of the challenge ahead should not be underestimated. Delivering homes that are fit for the future will require more joined-up thinking across funding models, tenant engagement and supply chain management.

In this episode of the 21CC podcast, we hear from Thomas Fountain, director of asset knowledge and insight at Places for People, and Dan Germann, managing director at Durkan Regen.

They discuss what lies ahead and reveal the key ingredients for successful partnerships between contractors and housing providers. They also outline what successful delivery of the Warm Homes Plan could look like in five years’ time.

Listen now to hear what it will take to turn retrofit ambition into action across the housing sector.