Henry J Lyons has taken Building of the Year in the Office category at the Building and Architect of the Year Awards 2026, earning recognition for a project that demonstrates how new build and heritage architecture can be unified into a coherent and confident composition without either element diminishing the other.

The Shipping Office impressed the judges as a highly accomplished entry in one of the programme's most competitive categories. The panel recognised it as a building that "brings together new build and heritage elements with clarity and control," noting that a strong and consistent architectural language links old and new throughout, resulting in a composition that reads as a single resolved whole rather than two buildings in uneasy proximity. At the scale at which The Shipping Office operates, achieving that coherence demands exceptional design discipline and the panel's response reflected as much.

The integration of existing fabric is handled with equal care. Rather than treating the heritage elements as a constraint to be managed, Henry J Lyons has engaged with them as an active part of the architectural narrative, allowing the existing building to inform the character and detail of the new. That approach requires confidence as well as skill, and the result is a scheme that feels genuinely rooted in its context while meeting the demands of a contemporary commercial brief.

The project's sustainability credentials add a further dimension to its achievement. A high-performing sustainability approach sits alongside the architectural and heritage ambitions of the scheme, demonstrating that environmental responsibility and design quality are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing ones. In an office market where sustainability performance is increasingly a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator, The Shipping Office delivers above that baseline with clarity and purpose.

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