History

From the very start, Max sought a collaborative approach to running a business, to encourage shared responsibility and a feeling of ownership. He felt that designing a system for people to work in productively and creatively was as important as the design of the buildings themselves. Max's school (the progressive Dartington Hall School) had been a democracy, so why not the business? He thought that reasonable people working together should be able to come up with a reasonable system, and after agreeing on a brief internally, he found an innovative young lawyer, Lennie Hoffman (later Baron Hoffmann) to turn it into a working legal document. After it had been signed by all current staff, the practice legally became a partnership: Max Fordham & Partners.

The brief stated “A partnership consists of a group of people jointly combined in an enterprise to make a profit (living). The people must trust one another and act in their joint interest... This partnership is being formed so that all members of the firm benefit from and are responsible for its actions. It is intended that everybody who works in the firm should be partners and should have control over the firm that is analogous to the control which shareholders have over the control of a limited company.”

The big breakthrough project for Max was the Alexandra Road Housing Estate for Camden Council in London. He teamed up with the architect Neave Brown and they won a competition to provide over 500 new homes, a school, and a community centre. It was the first post-war housing estate to become listed. Read more about Max's innovative approach to the heating system.

The same year, another important project was completed, Newport High School, with Evans & Shalev Architects. The brief called for a comprehensive school for 1,200 pupils in addition to a swimming pool, gym, and hall which could also be used as a community centre for a new local housing estate. Hollow blockwork concealed conduits for the electrical installation, while daylight control for the glazed south elevations was provided by deep overhangs. Heating was distributed by low-convector radiators, which were on a continuous pipe run through the in-situ columns. A special, curved, fluorescent light fitting was developed to accommodate the ceiling coffers.

Throughout the 1990s, Max became widely recognised (and awarded) for his outstanding contribution to the design of low-energy buildings.

Following being made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts back in 1984, Max became a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992.

Just two years later, Max was awarded an OBE for 'services to engineering'. When the Queen asked Max what he did, he replied "Ma’am, I’m a plumber!"

Later in the decade, Max received two further awards: Honorary Fellowship of the RIBA in 1996 and, the following year, a CIBSE Gold Medal.

Not many practices can say "we wrote the book on sustainability", but we can. Since our first publication, we have been leading the industry in designing buildings that use less energy and tread lightly on the planet.

Environmental Design: An Introduction for Architects and Engineers (edited by Randall Thomas, a partner at Max Fordham) was first published in 1995. It set out the principles of our environmental design approach and became a course text at many schools of architecture and engineering. Max wrote the preface to all three editions and, with each, his tone grew in urgency.

1^st Edition (1995): "In our practice we believe in stimulating architecture that provides for the long-term needs of humanity – health and comfort – which the planet can sustainably provide."

2^nd Edition (1999): "Our governments have given undertakings at the Kyoto conference which call for radical approaches to the design of buildings. This book provides the basic information which is needed to initiate new designs and shows how the ideas can be implemented – the rest is up to all of us. Good luck!"

3^rd Edition (2006): "The economies of the world are growing at an unprecedented rate [...] This growth will be a disaster if it carries an equivalent emission of carbon dioxide [...] architecture must reduce the demand for energy while maintaining the benefits of health and comfort. This book provides the basic information [...] ‘Good luck!’ is not enough. Take up the challenge."

The bold redesign of the Contact Theatre was a direct expression of Max's inventive approach to energy-efficient services. The building, designed with Alan Short, integrated the 1963 auditorium with additional backstage facilities, a studio theatre, rehearsal rooms, a foyer, a bar, and a restaurant. Developed after extensive analysis, the innovative assisted natural ventilation system kept audiences comfortable using a fraction of the energy required by mechanical ventilation and made the Contact Theatre (possibly) the first naturally-ventilated modern theatre in the UK.

Extract stacks were built on the roof, with H-pot chimneys designed to provide good operation in all wind conditions. Each stack contained a slow-speed axial fan controlled by a Building Management System (BMS) to minimise power use and limit noise generation.

In 2020, the practice completed a return to Contact Theatre, working alongside Sheppard Robson on a new refurbishment and extension scheme.

Created in 1959, the Prince Philip Designers Prize celebrated how designers improve daily life by solving problems and turning great ideas into commercial reality. In its final years, before Prince Philip stepped down in 2011, the prize was awarded to some of the leading names in British design, including James Dyson (1997), Terence Conran (2003), Norman Foster (2004) and Thomas Heatherwick (2006).

In November 2008, Max was awarded the prize from HRH The Duke of Edinburgh in recognition of his "outstanding lifetime achievement in creating and establishing many of the precepts of modern environmental design and sustainable engineering for buildings".

On being awarded the prize, in his acceptance speech, Max concluded by saying “I hope […] this prize helps to promote the view that engineers are designers in the widest sense”.

Soft Landings is the opposite of simply handing over the keys and walking away when construction is complete. It’s about collaborating with design team members, contractors, and building users to minimise the “performance gap” between design and use.

In 2014, following our pioneering work on Keynsham Civic Centre, we were part of the industry task force that further developed the Soft Landings Framework and we took an additional leading role in the creation of the accompanying guidance for its application. 

In the years since, we have developed our approach on projects such as Oriam Sports Performance Centre and the Contact Theatre in Manchester, and were named "Soft Landings Practioner of the Year" at the inaugural BSRIA Soft Landings Awards. We continue to lead the industry in the delivery of buildings that perform as intended and are a joy to be in while using the least amount of energy possible.

Passivhaus is a world-leading low-energy, high-quality, and high-comfort standard for building design and construction. In many ways, it’s a formalisation of the approach to building design that we’ve applied since our foundation in 1966. As its name suggests, it relies on passive environmental design strategies to reduce operational energy and it prioritises resident comfort. It’s now also an important part of our recommended recipe for net zero carbon buildings. 

2018 marked the completion of our first Passivhaus project, the redevelopment of Agar Grove Estate (Phase 1a). Working with Hawkins\Brown and Mae architects and the residents of the existing Agar Grove Estate, we persuaded the Greater London Authority to grant planning permission based on a Passivhaus approach, which included exemplary thermal requirements. On completion of Phase 1a, it immediately became a proof-of-concept for large-scale social housing developments, meaningfully tackling fuel poverty by reducing residents' fuel bills by 70%.

2020 was a year of action on our sustainability commitments. In February, we became the first UK business to have all our offices verified as net zero carbon in operation against the UKGBC Net Zero Carbon Framework, and we have continued to be verified every year since. We also committed to providing – on any project, at no cost to the client – an initial net zero carbon workshop to lay out a pragmatic route to net zero carbon.

Just a few months later, we became one of a very select few in the UK construction industry to sign up to the World Green Building Council's Net Zero Carbon Buildings Commitment, which further confirmed our pledges of "all occupied offices continuing to operate at net zero carbon" and publicly disclosing the operational energy of our business.

We rounded off the year with the launch of our Net Zero Carbon Guide, a free and open resource to help clients and collaborators navigate the process of achieving net zero carbon for both old and new buildings. The guide quickly became a widely respected resource and has since been referenced throughout the industry.

Our exhibition 'Engineering Ideas, Engineering Change' to celebrate Max's life and work took place in early 2023 at the Building Centre in London. It told the story of Max as a pioneer of low-energy, sustainable building design through a curated collection of drawings, models, original letters and videos. A timeline of Max's life included letters and drawings from his childhood in Jamaica and about his education at the progressive Dartington Hall School. Through seminal projects from the previous 50 years, the exhibition highlighted many of Max's key ideas and their impact on the design of the built environment. Visitors were able to listen to Max speak about his approach to building design and the practice in his own words via an audio pod and film. View the full virtual exhibition.

In June 2023, the National Portrait Gallery, the latest in a long line of complex heritage retrofit projects in our portfolio, completed to widespread acclaim. The Guardian described our input as that of "environmental wizards" and commented that "the artistry of Max Fordham goes both into designing air-handling systems such that you don’t notice they are there and installing state-of-the-art glass that lowers daylight to levels that don’t damage the exhibits, while still giving you views of trees and sky."

Towards the end of the year, we were delighted to have three projects on the six-strong RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist and a parallel piece of analysis in the Architects' Journal showed that no one had worked on more RIBA Stirling Prize-shortlisted projects in the last five years than us!