If you want to understand the full breadth of what engineers do, there’s no better place to start than by looking at the program I’ve been privileged to oversee for two decades: the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Engineering Excellence Awards (EEA).
For nearly 60 years, the EEA awards program and gala celebration have honored the very best of the engineering industry, spotlighting dazzling feats of technical ingenuity and innovation. There’s a moment during the ceremony when the room falls silent, anticipation fills the air, and the final envelope is opened to reveal the recipient of the industry’s highest honor: the Grand Conceptor Award.
The last two years of Grand Conceptor winners tell the story of engineering excellence in full. It’s a tale of two envelopes that every would-be engineer needs to hear.
Very Different Winners
At the 58th Annual EEA Gala in May 2025, the Grand Conceptor was awarded to the Las Vegas Sphere. At 516 feet wide and 366 feet tall, it’s the world’s largest spherical structure, enclosing a theater for 17,600 guests beneath a domed roof and a suspended media plane.
Engineered for the punishing conditions of the Mojave Desert, Sphere endures temperature swings so extreme that its equatorial circumference expands and contracts up to 3 feet every single day. Sphere doesn’t just sit on the Vegas skyline; it performs on it. It’s the type of jaw-dropping achievement that makes a layperson such as me ask, “How is that even possible?”
Now, fast forward to this year’s EEA ceremony, where the Grand Conceptor went to the Klamath River Renewal Project, the largest dam removal and river restoration in history. There’s no skyline shot or glittering LED exterior. There’s only a river, once the third-largest salmon producer on the West Coast, flowing freely for the first time in more than a century after four aging hydroelectric dams came down. The project reopened more than 400 miles of habitat and reconnected tributaries and floodplains to their historic alignment. It’s already reviving native salmon populations and strengthening the resilience of an entire ecosystem.
Together, these back-to-back winners say something no single project could. Sphere is engineering at its most visible, a glittering jewel glowing in the desert night. The Klamath is engineering at its most invisible. Its greatest triumph is that you can stand on its riverbank and never know engineers had been there at all. But the industry’s most discerning panel of judges looked at both, in consecutive years, and said, “This is our best.”
The EEAs honor innovation, creative problem solving and engineering’s unique ability to improve our world. Such improvement doesn’t always have to be built upward.
This year’s competition drew a record 240 projects, judged by a panel of more than 30 experts who selected 16 Honor Awards and eight Grand Awards. The field included projects such as the LAX Metro Transit Center, the multimodal hub that recently carried hundreds of thousands of World Cup attendees in a dress rehearsal for when the city hosts the 2028 Olympics.
Grand Recognition
The engineering tent is big; it’s always been big. But the EEA Grand Conceptor is a spotlight, and where our industry points that spotlight matters.
It especially matters at a time when we continue to face workforce challenges. For young people deciding whether engineering is the right path for them, particularly those who are passionate about sustainability and resilience, the two most recent Grand Conceptor winners offer a powerful answer. The highest honor in engineering went to the world’s most spectacular building, and then, a year later, to the quiet correction of a century-old miscalculation. Same award. Same standard. Same standing ovation.
There’s a message here for every student or young professional wondering where their talents belong. Yes, you can build the marvel that lights up a skyline and stops traffic on The Strip. The EEAs will celebrate you, and rightly so. But there’s another avenue for those whose ambition runs to conserving rather than constructing, toward watersheds and habitats and the patient work of giving something back to the earth.
Some projects dazzle the eye, while others heal what we thought was lost. The Engineering Excellence Awards have always shown what engineers can do, but our two most recent Grand Conceptors show us something even better: They show us everything engineers can be.