Max Fordham
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Prof. Max Fordham OBE RDI FREng MA FCIBSE Hon FRIBA |
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|---|---|
| Born |
Sigurd Max Fordham 1933 England |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Engineer |
| Known for | Establishing Max Fordham LLP |
Sigurd Max Fordham OBE RDI FREng MA FCIBSE Hon FRIBA (born 1933), known as Max Fordham, is a British designer, engineer and pioneer of sustainable design and environmentally friendly engineering. He is the founder of building services engineering firm Max Fordham LLP.
Fordham was born in 1933 to Molly Swabey, a journalist, and Michael Fordham, a Jungian analytical psychotherapist. His parents’ marriage dissolved in 1940. Michael remarried another analytical psychotherapist Frieda Hoyle the same year.
Around this time, during World War Two, Fordham went with his mother to stay with his uncle in the Caribbean, 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 sunk 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.
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