Max Fordham

Fordham was born on 17 June 1933 to Molly Swabey, a journalist, and Michael Fordham,[6] a house physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, who was becoming interested in Jungian psychoanalysis. His parents’ marriage dissolved in 1940.[7] Michael remarried another analytical psychotherapist Frieda Hoyle the same year.[8]

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.[9]

Upon returning to England, Fordham attended the progressive Dartington Hall School,[10] which intended to change social attitudes[11] 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.[12] 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 G N 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.

Max Fordham's practice has designed the building services for very many projects since 1966. Some notable ones where he had a major personal involvement are

• Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk (while at Arup Associates)
• Newport High School, Newport, South Wales
• Hulme 5, Manchester, high rise development, since demolished
• Raychem building, Swindon
• Alexandra Road Estate, Swiss Cottage, London, modern iconic dense terraced housing, first post-war housing estate to be listed (Grade II*)
• Queen's Building at De Montfort University
• Contact Theatre, Manchester
• Lighthouse Arts Centre, Poole
• Olivier Theatre, Bedales School, Hampshire
• Environmental Building, Building Research Establishment, Watford
• RMC International Headquarters, Egham, Surrey
• Indoor cricket school at Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood, London[22]
• Heelis, the National Trust headquarters, Swindon

The house designed for himself in north London by his practice (including himself) in collaboration with bere:architects and Price & Myers was soon after his death verified as the UK's first net zero carbon house.[23]

Max Fordham became a Fellow of the RSA in 1984. He received an OBE in 1994. He was elected a Fellow[1] of the Royal Academy of Engineering[1] in 1992 and an honorary fellow of the RIBA in 1996.[24]

CIBSE (Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers) presented its Gold Medal to him in 1997[25] for his part in raising the perceived value of CIBSE and with a bronze medal for a research paper. He was President of the Institution in 2001,[26] after being Vice President in 1999 and President-elect in 2000.[17]

He was on the judging panel for the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2005 and in 2006 was voted into the inaugural Building Hall of Fame, a list of 40 people who have had the most significant positive impact on the UK construction industry in the last 40 years.[27]

He won the Prince Philip Designers Prize in 2008.[3][22][28] The honour is significant because the engineering of services installations in buildings is not usually associated with design.[29]