Natural History Museum, Urban Nature Project
Beautiful engineering for a sustainable future
We are Max Fordham. A partnership of engineers, designers and consultants, working with the built environment, to deliver a sustainable future and a thriving planet.
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Our services
We are building services engineers, designers, and sustainability consultants, bringing buildings to life with beautiful engineering. Working closely with the client and architect, we champion sustainable, low energy, and low carbon building design. In essence, our services cover everything that impacts the internal environment of a building and its performance – from the traditional ‘pipes and wires’ of mechanical and electrical engineering, to daylighting, acoustics, building physics, and strategic sustainability consultancy.
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All buildings should be comfortable and a pleasure to be in: warm, well-lit, well-ventilated, well-used, and well-loved. Our mechanical and electrical engineering, vertical transportation, acoustics, daylight, and lighting design services can help ensure just that. We maximise passive measures such as natural ventilation and daylighting, seamlessly dovetailing our designs with the building’s own form and architecture to result in simple, low-energy, and low-cost building services.
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In the face of an increasingly urgent climate emergency, it’s crucial that buildings consume as little energy as possible in their operation. Low energy, low carbon, and low operational costs are our watchwords when it comes to designing new buildings or retrofitting existing ones. We help our clients build sustainability goals into masterplans or early-stage feasibility studies, decarbonise existing estates, and optimise how a building performs against its targets for sustainability and user comfort.
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Meeting net zero carbon targets and minimising a building’s impact on the environment means reducing embodied carbon – the carbon tied up in the materials like steel, concrete, and plastic that go into a building’s construction and services design – as much as operational carbon (the carbon a building produces in its heating, cooling, and lighting). We facilitate material reuse with circular economy strategies, steer low embodied carbon design from the earliest project stages with whole life carbon assessments, and offer advice on planning and compliance, all helping to reduce the carbon footprint of construction.
Awards highlights
| 2025 | CIBSE Building Performance Awards | The Entopia Building Building Performance Champion |
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| 2025 | Greater Cambridge Design & Construction Awards | King's College Chapel, University of Cambridge The David Mackay Award for Engineering and Sustainability |
| 2024 | RIBA Stirling Prize | National Portrait Gallery Shortlist |
| 2024 | CIBSE Building Performance Awards | Ravelin Sports Centre, University of Portsmouth Project of the Year |
| 2024 | RIBA International Award for Excellence | Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Niger |
| 2024 | RIBA National Award | Homerton College Dining Hall, University of Cambridge |
| 2023 | RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing | A House for Artists |
| 2023 | RIBA National Award | Agar Grove Estate |
| 2022 | RIBA Stirling Prize | Magdalene College New Library, University of Cambridge |
Careers at Max Fordham
Our practice is composed of people who believe in and are passionate about what we do – and it shows.
Described as "environmental wizards" by The Guardian for our part in the redevelopment of the National Portrait Gallery, we apply considered thinking to push boundaries, drive change, and solve problems, whether they relate to our projects or running our business.