As a result, Buro Happold has undertaken a large number of tensile and other lightweight structures since its founding (including the Millennium Dome).

[1] In 1982, Buro Happold started to work with Future Tents Ltd (FTL) on a variety of temporary and recreational structures.

One of its specialist consultancy services is the fire consultancy group, FEDRA, and software development group SMART which worked with The University of Sheffield to develop Vulcan software,[7] widely used throughout the fire engineering industry.

[14] In 1973, before the founding of Buro Happold, Edmund Happold, Ian Liddell, Vera Straka, Peter Rice and Michael Dickson established a lightweight structures research laboratory corresponding to Frei Otto's similar research institute at the university of Stuttgart.

Ted Happold was the first to introduce ethylenetetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) as a cladding material, and the outcomes of the research carried out by the laboratory led to the development of the designs for the Mannheim Multihall gridshell and a number of landmark fabric structures in the Middle East and the UK, allowing the new building forms to become generally accepted by architects and clients.

[9] Buro Happold's early projects included designing giant fabric umbrellas for Pink Floyd concerts,[15] the Munich Aviary and the Mannheim Multihalle, both with Frei Otto, an architect who repeatedly worked with Buro Happold on projects which pioneered lightweight structures.

[citation needed] Buro Happold won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Tuwaiq Palace in Riyadh in 1998 and again in 2010 for the design of the Wadi Hanifah wetlands.

[63] Buro Happold also won the Queen's Award for Enterprise twice, for export achievement and again for sustainable development.

In 1999 Buro Happold engineers Ian Liddell, Paul Westbury, Dawood Pandor and technician Gary Dagger won the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert Award for their design of the Millennium Dome – only the second time in the award's history that it has gone to a construction project.

[21] In 2007, Buro Happold won the IStructE Supreme Award for the Savill Building in Windsor Great Park.

The Institution of Structural Engineers announced there were to be two winners of its coveted Gold Medal in 2012: Buro Happold's then-CEO Paul Westbury was one of them.