The Transformational Buildings Changemaker

Meet Alastair MacGregor, the driving force behind WSP's Property & Buildings team in the U.S., a visionary leader shaping Future Ready® built environments through a wealth of global experience.

United States | Thursday, January 18, 2024
Reading Time : 5 minutes

For 25 years, Alastair (Aly) MacGregor has championed transformational thinking in building engineering by advocating for questions that probe deeper, processes that are more engaging and solutions that deliver on bold sustainability objectives. In 2022, he brought his visionary approach to WSP. Under his leadership, Property and Buildings in the U.S. is exploring what makes a place—a building, a neighborhood, a city—perform better, beneficially, beautifully.

Discover more about Aly’s Future Ready® perspective, insights and initiatives that are helping WSP rethink our buildings and cities to address the challenges of climate change and society’s evolving needs.

Describe the responsibilities of your position and your background.

I lead the Property & Buildings team in the U.S., which encompasses all the technical disciplines associated with delivering the built environment—mechanical and electrical, structural engineering, specialty capabilities like acoustics and technology solutions. I joined WSP in 2022, motivated by the world-class experts and the companywide commitment to Future Ready thinking. Rooted in experience all over the world, my purpose is helping clients, communities and my team step out of their comfort zones and into boldness.

As for my background, a passion for high-performance solutions to tough challenges led me to a mechanical engineering degree, as I firmly believe that there is no better forum than engineering for learning how to solve complex problems. Since moving to the U.S. in 2004, I have been able to work on many of the world’s firsts as well as amazing projects on nearly every continent. These include the world’s first LEED Platinum sports arena and the world’s first commercial spaceport. I’ve also secured several patents for innovations supporting the built environment.

How do you see your work as change-making?

The role of a building engineer is different now than it was when I started my career almost 25 years ago, and it continues to evolve rapidly. Technical engineering skillsets are still critically important but need to be augmented by the ability to ask the right questions, while constantly embracing innovation.

Personally, I see my role and our work as change-making because WSP champions transformational thinking both internally and in the broader market by asking, “What if we could”? The way we have always done things as an industry isn’t going to cut it going forward, and I’m really excited about the role that WSP can play in the future state of engineering, from the individual net zero, resilient building to the decarbonization of a portfolio or a community.

Alastair MacGregor

Business Line Executive, Property and Buildings

United States

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I see my role and our work as change-making because WSP champions transformational thinking both internally and in the broader market.

What is the biggest challenge in your field that you’re working to help resolve?

Like in many sectors, talent shortage is the biggest challenge we’re facing in building engineering. Graduates aren’t exploring the field, in part because we don’t always prioritize sharing just how cool building engineering is. I wish people could put on AR goggles and see how all the components work together to make a building perform.

Educating people on the exciting opportunities within our field has become one of our goals at WSP. We’re also embracing the symbiosis of technology and talent, such as with AI and machine Learning, so that we can digitally empower our people and help our clients achieve their best solutions.

Co-authored by Alastair MacGregor, WSP's Future Ready book provides practical guidance on how leaders can confront increasingly complex challenges around climate change and sustainability.

List a few key initiatives that you’ve delivered through your position.

WSP’s Future Ready® approach defines who we are within Property & Buildings. Designing for tomorrow permeates the culture, and upon arriving I found interdisciplinary teams ready to share those ideas with the world, while also operationalizing the approach internally. A book seemed like a natural way to catalyze both goals, so Future Ready: Your Organization's Guide to Rethinking Climate, Resilience, and Sustainability was born. Later in 2023, we launched an accompanying digital game, The Future Ready® Scenario Planning Challenge, which we launched during COP28 and plan to introduce to clients through collaborative working sessions.

We are committed to asking Future Ready questions as part of our standard design process, ensuring that every building we deliver remains an asset over time. What’s next? We have some ideas.

Which projects embody what you admire about WSP?

My son was reading a book about Mars recently and I got to tell him that my team is working with NASA on the Mars Sample Receiving Facility. You should have seen his eyes light up and his mind explode. The responsibility of that project, ensuring that nothing from Earth touches Mars and that nothing from Mars touches Earth, is massive and requires big, bold thinking.

We’ve been able to deliver other designs that haven’t been done before, like the country’s first all-electric hospital, located in Irvine, California. Our manufacturing project with Wolfspeed in North Carolina is helping improve the supply chain for many of the innovations associated with our decarbonized future. Projects like these highlight the smart people here that are advancing designs while positively impacting our communities, the work that exemplifies the WSP that we want to be.

What makes WSP’s Property & Buildings team unique as a partner for clients?

Our engineers aren’t scared of complexity. Instead, we thrive on it. And though we’re serving clients all over the country, we are united by a common passion for high performance — for both our teams and our buildings. Further, we operate with a quiet confidence that assures our clients we listen to them and understand their projects and business, and then challenge ourselves to preemptively explore issues that could manifest in the future. To become a trusted partner instead of merely a service provider, we seek deeper relationships and genuine understanding by staying Future Ready in everything we do.

Any engineering firm can create technical documents and constructible designs. We want to redefine our deliverables to include the process, the experience, thereby embracing the roller coaster that is innovative, incredible design. At the end of each project, we want our clients to say, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.”