Oriam Sports Performance Centre is Scotland’s national home for football, also serving the national rugby team, and the national home for the governing bodies of basketball, handball, squash, raquetball and volleyball.

Our work included Soft Landings consultancy, along with M&E and acoustic design.

Max Fordham’s Soft Landings process was applied to all stages of the project, from the early briefing through to the commissioning, completion, handover and aftercare. The result is an exemplar of sustainable design, construction and operation.

Oriam won the award for Project of the Year (Leisure) at the 2018 CIBSE Building Performance Awards.

Bath and Northeast Somerset Council set the challenging brief of achieving an energy-in-use DEC rating of ‘A’ by the end of the second year of operation.

Reaching that target means closing the performance gap between design intent and operational reality. We developed an Energy Risk Register based on our experience from post occupancy evaluation and research carried out with University College London. We identified barriers to the DEC ‘A’ target, and then considered how to mitigate them at each stage of the project, from briefing through to building operation. The mitigation strategies informed the contract documents and building user guidance.

For this project, we wrote the industry’s first Soft Landings Employer’s Requirements, setting out roles and processes that contribute towards achieving the DEC ‘A’ target. We also embedded the energy performance requirements into the contract in an innovative way. This proved instrumental in achieving the high performance outcome.

Since handover, we’ve been monitoring the environmental performance and working with the client and construction team to optimise it. We are close to achieving the ambitious DEC ‘A’ rating.

Max Fordham is working with Sheppard Robson Architects on a new scheme to carry out the £6m remodelling of the arts venue’s existing building, transforming the visitor experience and improving its visibility from Manchester’s Oxford Road.

In addition to our M&E role, we are leading the Soft Landings approach to ensure the design is developed in collaboration with Contact’s operational team and that key systems are optimised during the first year of operation. We have facilitated a number of workshops focusing on sharing lessons learnt from the existing building, reviewing the proposed environmental control strategy and planning for an effective handover

The Hayward Gallery has recently undertaken plant refurbishment. In order to comply with the Government Indemnity Scheme for art loans, the Gallery needed to deliver very stable environmental control.

We have provided a 2-year Aftercare service, overseeing the optimisation of the environmental controls. We have worked closely with the Facilities Manager to tailor the Building Management System user interface, to suit how people work, balancing simplicity with visibility and meaningful data.

Heelis, the new headquarters of the National Trust, was a key project in the development of the Soft Landings Framework and led to our involvement in the Soft Landings User Group.

National Trust employees were moved from four separate buildings into a new working environment that was very different from what they were used to - for example, the new building has no air conditioning.

Working with the Facilities Management team, we managed to maximise comfort and efficiency by engaging with staff and explaining how the building operated. In addition, our Post Occupancy monitoring helped to identify areas for improvement and solutions to problems, all contributing to reduced energy use, a satisfied client and happier occupants.