Max Fordham

Sigurd Max Fordham OBE RDI FREng FCIBSE Hon FRIBA (17 June 1933 – 4 January 2022) was a British designer, engineer and pioneer of sustainable design and environmentally friendly engineering.

He was the founder of building services engineering firm Max Fordham LLP.

Fordham was born on 17 June 1933 to Molly Swabey, a journalist, and Michael Fordham, a house physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, who was becoming interested in Jungian psychoanalysis.

His parents’ marriage dissolved in 1940.

Michael remarried another analytical psychotherapist Frieda Hoyle the same year.

During World War Two, in the summer of 1940, Fordham went with his mother to stay with his uncle, Christopher Swabey, in Jamaica, to avoid the bombing of London.

Fordham settled in well there and Molly decided to return to England.

However, while crossing the Atlantic in 1942, her boat sank and she drowned.

Upon returning to England, Fordham attended the progressive Dartington Hall School, which intended to change social attitudes in the world.

The school was a pupil-run democracy with the headmaster sitting in on the meetings and with a formal power of veto, which was never used.

Fordham was the elected chairman for several years.

Lessons were voluntary but the first hour of every morning there was compulsory "useful work", where students helped maintain the school building.

Fordham learned skills such as carpentry and metalwork and completed work including working as an assistant in the chemistry laboratory, book-binding in the library, repairing dining room oak chairs, building desks and turning spare parts for the electric polishing machines.

It was an apprenticeship as such, and useful work tended to extend beyond the allotted hour.

This was where Fordham first identified that he liked to design and create – the roots of his career stem from there.

After school (1952–54), Fordham did National Service as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm.

When he returned, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, completing an MA in Natural Science (1954–1957).

He chose to specialise in chemistry, physics, maths and mineralogy.

This gave him a deeper education in chemistry and physics than he would have done if he had studied engineering.

Fordham found university disappointing and began to have doubts about becoming a scientist.

He enjoyed the company of people studying the humanities and had shared rooms with Simon Hepworth-Nicholson, a school friend and artist.

The professor of architecture, Sir Leslie Martin (designer of the Royal Festival Hall), suggested he consider heating engineering, a new field where he could be free to be inventive and design things using his physics degree.

He took a vacation job with engineering firm GN Haden.

There he completed a small research project which resulted in his salary trebling.

After that, he did a one-year course at the National College of Heating, Ventilation, Refrigeration and Fan Engineering before starting work.

Sir Leslie Martin arranged a job for Fordham as a development engineer at Weatherfoil Heating Systems Ltd in 1958, where he worked until 1961.

There he completed a wide variety of design and research work.

He designed the metered fan convection heating for Harvey Court, Cambridge, and was named as the inventor when this was patented.

While Weatherfoil gave him a generous introduction to the building industry, they wanted to promote him away from design and into representing the firm.

By this time, he realised this direction included all of the building services: water supply, drainage, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, as well as electrical engineering and he wanted more time to develop his detailing skills.

After meeting Sir Philip Dowson through his future wife, Thalia Dyson, in 1961 he joined the Building Group (now Arup Associates), a group that included architects and structural engineers from Ove Arup & Partners.

Here Fordham had to get to grips with drawing the services in complete detail.

It provided an integrated team, where discussions about services could be argued over the lunch table.

Eventually, Fordham took on the public health and electrical services as well, so the services disciplines could be represented by just one person at meetings.

After moonlighting while at Arup Associates, Fordham realised he had the opportunity to start his own practice.

In September 1966 he left Arup, and started working from his bedroom.

Here he pursued a new approach to engineering based on his own curiosity about how buildings work.

He resisted being pigeonholed into the conventional boxes of engineering.

He was always interested in the whole building, taking a creative but essentially practical approach to building services design, starting "with the edge of the universe as its boundary and then quickly narrowing down to the specific problem".

Fordham did not like imposing his will on people, and developed a philosophical justification for reconstituting the practice as a democracy.