CIBSE is very sad to learn of the death of Max Fordham, who passed away on Tuesday 4 January 2022.
Max was CIBSE president in 2001 and his huge contribution to building services engineering extended well beyond the building services sector.
He was an inventive, brilliant engineer, who patented inventions and brought a new rigour to delivering and measuring building performance. He brought together the separate disciplines of mechanical, electrical and public health engineering, and was one of the first to tackle building services design in an integrated way.
He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992 in recognition of his pioneering work and practical innovations and in 2008 won the prestigious Prince Philip Design Award.
More recently his contribution to Passivhaus design won his consultancy CIBSE Building Performance Awards in consecutive years, for the multi-residential London Agar Grove Estate redevelopment, winning Residential Project of the Year 2020, and his own house in Camden, which won the same award in 2021.
He will be greatly missed by the whole of the CIBSE community and beyond. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends and all those at Max Fordham, the partnership that he established with his late wife in 1966.
Professor Sigurd Max Fordham OBE FREng FCIBSE MA(Cantab) HonFRIBA RDI
Born: 17th June 1933, Died: 4th January 2022 (aged 88)
CIBSE Journal Max Fordham interview