Adam Ritchie
BSc CPhys MInstP MCIBSE

Senior Partner

Building services engineers hold a central role in the design team, taking the lead on improving the performance of the built environment. With the project’s sustainability targets in mind and an understanding of other design team members’ goals, I can guide the design towards a more sustainable outcome for the whole building.

Max Fordham LLP taught me how to design buildings. Until I joined the practice in 1998, my interests had been practical and based on long summers spent with artisan tradesmen restoring a farmhouse in the Loire valley.

I learnt about building services engineering on the job, not only from colleagues, but also from architects and others I worked with on student accommodation, theatres, low-energy offices and housing.

I worked on one of the first projects to be scrutinised under the Mayor of London’s on-site renewable energy policy in 2004. This legislation was the turning point for more widespread involvement of engineers at a project’s conceptual stage. Continuing to increase this profile is one of my principle interests today.

Now, I lead a team of consultants with particular expertise in guiding clients and designers at this early stage through the issues of sustainability and energy.

Currently a Senior Partner, I remain involved in the practice’s MEP design projects, not only to share my knowledge but because I need to see our thinking through to implementation. Most recently this involved the leadership of our MEP commission on the Masdar Institute Neighbourhood, with ten engineers working from concept through to construction documentation.

The now-retired Randall Thomas encouraged me to pursue architectural teaching, where I learnt to communicate environmental engineering in a more accessible, non-technical way. Since then, I’ve co-authored Sustainable Urban Design: An Environmental Approach as well as writing regular columns in the RIBA Journal.

I’m also back working in the Loire valley, albeit at a different scale, as the MEP team leader for the Grand Musée d'Art à Nantes.