Each edition brings together the people who shape the city — municipalities, architects and engineers, developers, academia, civil society — for a conversation on a tension that city is facing.

Sounding Board was a live event format that gave start-ups, academics, researchers and architects a platform to test fresh ideas with industry experts. Each session centred on short TED-style presentations followed by challenge, discussion and feedback, helping promising ideas gain visibility and practical critique. 

The series was held in Zurich, Rotterdam and Berlin in 2023. Across those events, speakers explored topics including material-efficient construction, reuse beyond recycling, fabrication-aware generative design, reef recovery, digital circular construction and new approaches to urban planning.

The Impact Summit was a focused in-person gathering that brought together leaders from across the construction and real estate value chains to address a pressing industry challenge. Rather than a broad conference, it was framed as a targeted discussion aimed at identifying practical ways to accelerate change. 

The 2023 Impact Summit was held at Columbia University in New York City under the theme Embodied Carbon: America’s Next Frontier. It concentrated on short-term opportunities to reduce embodied carbon in buildings in the United States, linking sustainability ambition to real-world implementation. 

NGX, the Next Generation Accelerator workshop, was a two-day strategy event that brought together a hand-selected group of emerging experts to help shape future ideas for the built environment. It was designed as a collaborative working session rather than a public-facing conference, with a strong emphasis on dialogue, experimentation and long-term transformation. 

Held in Zweideln, Switzerland in 2022, the workshop gathered 11 members from ten countries and five continents. The programme included brainstorming on how to build momentum within the sector, visits to projects near Zurich and NEST Dübendorf, and recommendations on how the Foundation could better support rising talent and accelerate change at scale. 

Over two decades, the Awards Ceremony series served as the Holcim Foundation’s main platform for recognising winning projects and bringing them to wider regional and international audiences. Held across multiple competition cycles and regions, these events combined celebration with visibility, helping showcase winning entries as innovative and influential responses to the urgent challenges facing the built environment.

Awards Talks was a series of panel discussions built around questions raised by winning projects. Rather than simply presenting the projects again, these events used them as a starting point for broader conversations with multidisciplinary experts, creating a more interpretive and discussion-led format. 

The series included in-person events in Zurich, London and Berlin in 2024. Topics ranged from timber-concrete hybrid construction at ETH Zurich, to designing for nature in the city at the Natural History Museum in London, and urban infill lessons from Holzmarkt in Berlin, with each event bringing together architects, engineers, clients and moderators from across the field.

ceremony itself. It gave audiences the chance to hear directly from winners about the ideas behind their projects and the realities of delivering sustainable design in different social, environmental and economic contexts. 

The 2024 series featured ten live, 60-minute webinars built around the 20 Holcim Awards 2023 winners.