RMF Engineering

RMF Engineering is a privately held MEP engineering firm started in 1983 and based in Baltimore, Maryland. It has more than 350 employees in 11 U.S. offices, including Raleigh, Charlotte, Charleston, Boston, Atlanta and Columbus. Most of its work is for universities, hospitals and government campuses, where it designs building systems along with the central plants and utility infrastructure behind them. Its Charleston office puts it close to South Carolina campus work. At Coastal Carolina University in Conway, RMF is the MEP engineer on the $75 million Health and Human Performance Building, an 85,000-square-foot academic building under construction with Hood Construction as construction manager.

Only one of RMF’s five service lines is the MEP design most people associate with the firm. The other four are district energy, thermal and electrical utilities, commissioning and construction quality management, and energy and decarbonization. For a university or hospital client that distinction is the whole point: the same firm can design the chilled water plant, the distribution loop and the building systems hanging off it, then commission the result.

The campus utility work has institutional weight behind it. A former RMF vice president served as chairman of the International District Energy Association. The firm also maintains accreditation as an Authorized Inspection Agency for boilers and pressure vessels, which is a company-level credential rather than an individual one and is rare among design consultancies.

Commissioning is staffed as its own group of around fifteen professionals and can be bought independently of design, which matters to owners who want an independent set of eyes on a contractor’s work.

Markets number five: higher education, healthcare, federal government, science and technology, and civic. Named work includes MEP design for Harvard University’s graduate student housing at 100 South Campus Drive, an engineering services term contract with Children’s National, the Strategic Command Center at Highlands for Charleston Water System, and federal projects for the National Institutes of Health and NIST, including a radiation physics laboratory expansion.

The office network has grown unevenly and deliberately: Charleston went from two people to thirty, Raleigh from ten to fifty. Eleven US offices now run from Baltimore through Albany, Atlanta, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Columbus, Ft. Mitchell, Northfield, Raleigh and York. Rick Borkowicz, PE is the firm’s fourth president, and staff development is formalised through a three-semester co-op program and a two-year Leadership Development Program.