Max Fordham
The Prince Philip Designers Prize 2008
Max won the Design Council's annual award, The Prince Philip Designers Prize for 'outstanding contribution to society through design'. Max was nominated by the Royal Society of Arts, and previous winners include Terence Conran, James Dyson and Norman Foster. As he said in his acceptance speech, the significance of the award is recognition that engineering is design.
BSJ Top 30
The Building Services Journal voted Max No.1 of the 30 people who 'have most influenced the industry in the past three decades'. The 30, who included Ove Arup and Norman Foster, were nominated by 50 senior engineers. According to the citation ' Forty years ago he founded the company that beaers his name...one of the most respected consultancies in the business... responsible for many exciting sustainable building projects, such as the City of London Academy, the new Naples High-Speed Rail Station and the 300m Tour Generali in Paris'.
Top Green Guru
In 2008 Max was voted one of Building Magazine's Top Green Gurus 'the ten people who have most influenced the green building movement in the UK'. Judges commented that 'the practice has contributed to some of the most environmentally advanced buildings in the UK...designing low-energy building services decades before it was trendy. From the organisation of his practice to his infectious enthusiasm, his intelligent and unconventional approach to the industry is a breath of fresh air'.
Building Industry Hall of Fame 2006
Max was voted into Building Magazine's 40th Anniversary Hall of Fame, 'those who have done most to change the built environment since 1966'. He is the only building services engineer on a list that includes Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Ove Arup. Judges commented 'Max Fordham was perhaps the first engineer to lead the m&e sector ...towards a more aesthetic and environmentally aware strategy'.
Max Fordham's statement for the Prince Philip Designers Prize
Max traced the development of his ideas about design and engineering in his Designers Prize statement, excerpted below:
"My ambition led me to want to make an impact as an engineer helping to design the services for buildings, and my career has led to my nomination by the Royal Society of Arts to enter for this prize. As I see it, I started by developing firstly an understanding of the brief for a new type of building services engineer, then the skills to meet the brief, and finally a practice to make an impact on the process of designing services for buildings. [A} large part of my work is demonstrated by the engineering practice I started, and by the number of engineers in the industry who now enjoy a creative and intellectual approach to building services design.
The design brief contains subjective and practical demands. The practical problems have to be a priority for a design engineer, but subjective values are essential. Image can satisfy an important set of sensations [but] the key to my career is to understand that the brief for designers, especially in engineering, is not entirely a matter of image.
Many of the people who joined me [early] are still with the practice. They were learning on the job by doing all the details. I do not enjoy imposing my will on people, and I developed a philosophical justification for reconstituting the practice as a democracy. “Anyone fit to be an employee is fit to be a partner” was the slogan. The design philosophy…was embedded in the partnership work. I was not the only thinker and the whole partnership was involved... We had formed a group of people who were in the habit of making complete design drawings... The success of the ideas is now demonstrated by the substantial number of awards which have accumulated to the credit of the practice, culminating in the Queens Award for Sustainability in 2004. We maintain the ethos by recruiting people who have no specialist conventional experience of building services engineering. We choose bright people who can write a good letter of application; show that they have looked at a simple object .. enough to sketch it; and they need a scientific training.
I do believe that the engineers do need to be recognised more by society. I have been invited to join the most high status engineering institutions, but building services describes what I want to do, and the CIBSE ( )is the club with which I identify. I took an exam to join it because I think any engineer who offers professional skill ought to show that the consensus of the industry is to be taken seriously. The institution makes strenuous attempts to generate research and guidance on our branch of engineering. It has not yet come to understand design as I think it should. So to that extent my most ambitious expectation has not yet been fulfilled.
Conclusion. My career has developed out of my ambition to make an impact on architecture through building services design. If I have gone some way to fulfilling this aim it shows through the parts of buildings I have designed, and a growing knowledge of how the design of buildings should be influenced by energy and services installations. I hope this Prize will stimulate a general appreciation in the design issues of energy and building services for buildings."
