“I am told I should be satisfied with the realisation of my aims, but I have further to go.”

Max Fordham (ENGLAND)
www.maxfordham.com

I became a building Services Engineer after my career as a boy stalled. I realised that I was not an academic. Desperate I joined the building industry as a heating engineer. I had an aspiration to change the perception of heating engineers in the building design field.

Designers have more fun than contractors was my first really irresponsible decision as I left contractor Weatherfoil and joined the Arup building Group of architects and engineers working together.

I discovered how buildings had to be designed by working on a series of laboratories and also privately doing the design and construction drawings for a series of houses. My colleagues at Arup expressed the view that design should not be done from catalogues and that services engineers should design and draw things as they would be installed. Schematic diagrams are just the starting point for a services engineer.

Examples are:
Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Oxford.
leading to: CIBA Horsham, the Mining and Metallurgy building, Birmingham, and Arups Loughborough development.

These experiences taught me what issues could reasonably be introduced to a discussion of building design.

I designed a special heater for the Mining and Metallurgy building. Mies van De Rohe was a model and some factories for Evode Ltd came out of that enthusiasm. My physics qualification was applied to a problem at the Sydney Opera House by Outzen This showed me that my physics degree had its uses in the construction industry. My model became the architects and structural engineers who were working round me and detailing everything in a building with very few contractor drawings. The realisation that the whole of building services engineering did not need to be separated into a whole group of specialisations namely heating, public-health engineering, air conditioning engineering, electrical engineering. Really one person ought to be able to design these things for a building. It was too late to revolutionise the way in which Arups were going to work.

I set out on my own to get building services engineers to design services properly. So that was my aspiration. To design that part of the building called building services in the complete way that I was taught by architects and structural engineers when I was young.

I then left Ove Arup who passed me a large job to design the services for a development called Hulme 5 in Manchester. My drawings were the shop drawings and enabled a high degree of prefabrication. At the other end of the scale I designed off peak electric heaters with fan controlled heat output for a group of 5 houses in London.

More jobs followed: Listed housing of Alexandra Road by Neave Brown Newport High School by Evans and Shalev in Wales. The details are important for minimalist modern architecture where everything has to be neat. My aspiration was developing, but then I had to think about financing and organising it so that the perception I wanted to change was large enough to be noticed. We resolved to form a partnership owned by everyone who had worked for 2 years in the business. Essentially that constitution is still in force and the practice now has 120 engineers. We worked on a large industrial complex with many megawatts of electricity demand and process energy requirements. A factory in Swindon with Architects Copartnership for a client called Raychem really represented the last building we worked on where the aim of completing the drawings for the services was a central part of our motivation..

The three day week and the oil crisis caused a recession in industry and a reappraisal of the way we used energy. In 1974 , there was a competition for a building at Kew Gardens to be called The Sir Joseph Banks building. All entrants had to make a prediction of the energy use for the building. We helped 20 architect competitors including the winner Manning and Clamp who produced an earth bermed building. The oil crisis certainly made energy a central part of services design and from 1974 it took over our thinking and enabled us to figure in the energy design issues.

Grove Road School, Plinke Leaman Browning Sparrow Grove Darbourne and Darke RMC Edward Cullinan Architects.

One of the groups of buildings which come out of the energy issue is the design of naturally ventilated auditoria.
The Queens Building, DeMontfort University, Short Ford Architects
The Contact Theatre, Manchester, Alan Short
Poole Art Center, Alan Short
Beadles School Theatre, Fielden Clegg Bradley
and finally The BRE environmental building, Fielden Clegg Bradley

These buildings are not in the High Tech stream of modern architecture. I think that designing buildings to work sustainably is difficult enough without trying to use large amounts of glass which is a poor barrier between the sheltered part of a building and the outside ambient environment. So I have never been able to make encouraging remarks to the high Tech Practitioners.

However The National Botanic Garden of Wales, Norman Foster suits our sustainable criteria.

This dream includes the conceptual design of a building, and hence we are involved with the whole sustainability question and it includes the detail of the construction and so we are concerned with the working drawing side of designing buildings. The structure of the business arises out of the intellectual aims.

I am told I should be satisfied with the realisation of my aims, but I have further to go.