A great interview with Cecil Balmond in the Financial Times, meanders around with him as he discusses the non-linearity of form, the aesthetics of flux, and the simplicity of pattern which underlies the engineering complexities of his works.
All the angles
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: January 20 2006 15:08 | Last updated: January 20 2006 15:08
ftmag 21-1Sir Christopher Wren had invented a barometer, a language for the deaf and dumb and an instrument for writing in the dark before he turned 17. He was professor of astronomy at 29 and one of the foremost mathematicians of his era before going on to design St Paul’s Cathedral later in his career. This may have counted as overachievement, even among renaissance men. But in the 17th century little distinction was made between the arts and the sciences; the greatest minds flitted between subjects like butterflies tempted from one flower to another.
The exponential growth of knowledge of the natural world has made such travel between the humanities and the inhumanities a virtual impossibility. No one now can embrace both the cutting edge of cosmology or maths and architecture or engineering - there is just too much to know. Or at least that has been the orthodoxy. Certainly some architects involve themselves in broader cultural issues: Herzog & de Meuron are often more sophisticated about art than curators, Daniel Libeskind writes excruciating poetry but creates beautifully crystalline forms using complex mathematical mappings, while Rem Koolhaas publishes funny, stimulating books that encompass everything from manga to slums. But few engage in the sciences beyond brief, usually pretentious nods to chaos theory or to fashionable images of fractals or self-similarity.
One man, however, exemplifies the search for how maths and science can inform construction. Sri Lankan-born Cecil Balmond, an engineer (and deputy chairman of engineers Arup, with whom he has been since 1968) rather than an architect, has for years worked with the world’s most avant-garde architects, including Koolhaas, to create extraordinary, experimental structures. Cult architects are not uncommon; cult engineers are rare. Balmond sees no disconnect: “I see structure as a punctuation of space, episodic and rhythmic. These are wholly architectural concerns,†he says.
“The geometry we’ve acquired is Platonic, static, it’s been with us for 2,000 years and is based on linearity, God at the centre, everything having an answer. It has served us well but Einstein killed off that kind of absolutism. Ideas of relativity, of mass affecting space emerged and ultimately led to complexity, non-linearity and mutual interdependence.â€
In an effort to harness and physically manifest the incredible, often baffling beauty of this complexity, Balmond founded the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU), which pools an eclectic array of disciplines from architecture and engineering to quantum physics, mathematics and even games and visualisation. “The AGU is about non-linearity, which is how the world is organised,†he says, adding, presumably for FT readers: “The stock market is, of course, the classical instance of non-linearity.â€
Wandering around the AGU’s surprisingly bland offices in a back lane in north London, looking at phenomenally complex models and watching seemingly random patterns build into self-organising structures on computer screens, you can’t help thinking why this hasn’t been done before. Architecture is of and about the physical world yet it currently reflects almost nothing of the advances in knowledge about the structure of matter, about space, mass, gravity and all those extra dimensions. Perhaps this is because the intellectual leaps necessary to comprehend quantum physics, string theory, genome mapping and so on are too large and distant from the actual world we perceive. Perhaps it is because we lack the ambition and the certainty of the Gothic cathedral builders or the Renaissance constructors of heavenly spheres translated into huge domes. Or perhaps it is because of innate conservatism. In lives of increasing flux, complex technology and working existences occupying cyberspace as much as real space, we like our houses to be made of brick with walls perpendicular to the ground because that is how we imagine houses to look.
“We’re trying to investigate a new aesthetic,†he tells me. “This is not about taking anything away from architects but a new area has appeared. The underlying substratum of contemporary thought has seen a steady move towards flux as opposed to fixity. Since the 1970s there’s been an embracing of complexity in all the arts but what is forgotten is that at the root of complexity is simplicity, a single equation or a rule repeated over and over becoming a complex web.â€
Balmond applied that web with Japanese architect Toyo Ito to create one of the most beautiful and delicate structures seen in London in recent years, the 2002 Serpentine Pavilion. The fragmented framework which came together to make the temporary structure was extrapolated from a simple algorithm linking points on the sides of a square, then extended beyond the building plane and wrapped back around to create walls. The pattern appears hugely complex but is in fact based on only a few repetitive physical elements, which made it easy to prefabricate as a series of standard pieces.
Rem Koolhaas wrote recently of Balmond: “Instead of solidity and certainty, his structures express doubt, arbitrariness, mystery and even mysticism. He is creating a repertoire that can engage the uncertainty and fluidity of the current moment.†Koolhaas’s odd, if engaging, Casa de Musica in Porto (which looks something like an upside-down skip from outer space) has been a recipient of Balmond’s structural innovation. The awesome CCTV (state television) building in Beijing, the world’s first wrap-around skyscraper, is another collaboration, and London is about to see its first Koolhaas structure, a collaboration with Balmond for the Serpentine Pavilion next year. This will be the amuse bouche before the AGU’s first major urban project, London’s huge Battersea Power Station site.
Francis Archer, the AGU’s quantum physicist, who studied under Stephen Hawking, takes me through the Battersea plans, including surfaces that flip back impossibly on themselves, Escher-like, to become ramps, interiors and walls. “What’s much more interesting than civil and structural engineering’s obsession with the biggest and the longest is the link between architecture, engineering and the arts,†he says. “Increasingly the flow of information and technology will mean that basic design can be outsourced. If we want to survive here in London we need to look for areas where we can add value.â€
What those areas might be is indicated by the eclectic mix of projects that the AGU’s sophisticated brand of fractal geometries, algorithms and aesthetics has been applied to, including the complexity of the tiles for Libeskind’s aborted V&A Spiral; the designs for the Grand Museum of Egypt, a monumentally ambitious project by the pyramids with Irish architects Heneghan Peng; and artworks by Anish Kapoor, including the Brobdingnagian floral ear-trumpet, “Marsyasâ€, at Tate Modern. They also encompass the unit’s first realised design: a bridge in Coimbra, Portugal, which breaks all the rules by breaking the journey - it kinks in the middle providing a bizarrely stronger yet more delicate line of structure but also a moment of contemplation and dislocation on the crossing.
Balmond’s engagement with the architectural avant-garde, which is by no means limited to structure but also takes in concept, form and space, reflects meaningfully on one of the key issues in contemporary design - decoration. Anathema to the puritanical, cleansing instinct of the monks of the modern movement, the heresy of decoration has been creeping back into architecture since postmodernism and has now become firmly established, this time with irony, kitsch and a Warholian transformation of the banal image into the icon lurking in the background. The trouble with decoration has been that architects retain a residual problem with its application - a century of dogma has not been in vain. If, however, decorative devices can be generated, seemingly randomly, by a computer, by a series of formulas, the architects’ reticence disappears and they are happy to have tiles or fenestration patterns based on algorithms or suchlike. The current craze for shifted grid facades, visible anywhere from David Adjaye’s Whitechapel Ideas Store to the new offices at Bankside by Allies and Morrison, is a demonstration of the transferral of responsibility from man to machine, which justifies such playfulness. Herzog & de Meuron generate their decorative devices via the abstraction of representational images, usually through blowing up in scale until the image becomes unrecognisable. Balmond’s trick is to move further from these intuitive approaches by presenting his devices with the neutrality of mathematics: decoration derived from numbers and natural structures as an extension to a structural system and expression does not need to be justified - it creates its own internal logic.
“I set a puzzle,†Balmond tells me. “Something to be searched, to keep the eye moving across the surfaces and the structure, playing mathematical games. Conventionally, as soon as there is a hint of mathematics or science, suddenly there is no aesthetic. It can be hard to manifest maths but when it can be done it is very beautiful. What we are doing here is creating a new forensic in aesthetics.â€
Balmond is undoubtedly an engineer of vision, an active participant in the creative process of architecture rather than one who merely calculates the figures for architects’ pre-formed ideas. But isn’t this mathematical application and generation pointless and self-indulgent? Are the forms derived superior structurally, philosophically or aesthetically because they result from complex sequences rather than, say, an abstracted picture of an elephant? “There can be that accusation of whimsy,†Balmond says, “but the rigour of structure counters it. This is how the cosmos itself is organised, how it continues to shape itself, through feedback and a complexity derived from simplicity, a single equation leading to a complex web. After all, what is the Parthenon if not a building about numbers, abstraction and proportion, about mathematics?â€
“Informal†by Cecil Balmond is published by Prestel and won the 2005 Banister Fletcher Prize.
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