Max Fordham LLP

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We are engineers who are driven by sustainability in building design. It was our founding principle and it still is. Our engineers are brilliant thinkers as well as pragmatic doers. We understand and consider all of the details that bring buildings to life. We think of ourselves as whole building engineers. We work closely with architects to design buildings that really work. This means we’re concerned with the big picture and the small detail of buildings. Our aim is the delivery of beautifully engineered buildings: low-energy buildings that work for the people who use them. We believe buildings should respond to the environment in which they exist. That’s our starting point and it drives the engineering approach, making sure that we embed principles of sustainability in everything we do. Our approach looks at the whole building rather than seeing building services as separate, specialist installations. This also minimises risk. It’s vital for us to understand the overall vision for a building – to sympathise with it, to interpret it through engineering. It’s equally vital to pay detailed attention to air quality, light, noise, orientation, materials and systems. In that way we engineer comfort for people into buildings. Awards don’t motivate us as much as the kudos we receive from satisfied clients, architects, building managers and building users, but they are always nice to win. Having said that, we’re the only practice to be crowned “CIBSE Building Performance Champion” twice (2022 and 2020), became BSRIA Soft Landings Practitioner of the Year in 2019, and were named ACE Inclusion & Diversity Champion in 2017. We’ve also had a project on four of the last five RIBA Stirling Prize shortlists.