The Informalist

Cecil Balmond has a simple plan to reinvent architecture: Break down the cage that separates structural engineering from design.

By Jennifer Kabat

Architectural superstar Rem Koolhaas swears by him. Structural engineer Cecil Balmond has been Koolhaas' collaborator on 30 projects since the mid-'80s, including the three that have made Koolhaas' name: the Bordeaux villa, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, and the new Seattle Public Library. Today, Koolhaas won't even start a project until Balmond has weighed in. "When we work together, there's more to it than just an engineer saying you need a column here, support there," Koolhaas attests. "Cecil has changed my outlook on structure and enabled me to rethink architecture."

German conceptualist Daniel Libeskind - famous for his museums in Denver, Berlin, and now London - also brings Balmond in at the earliest stage. "He's a thinker, a mystic," says Libeskind. "He's not your average engineer brought from the outside to check things out. He's there with us from the very beginning with his keen insights and keen design ability. Most engineers don't see engineering as an evolving adventure in design, but Cecil does." Balmond and Libeskind collaborated on the Spiral, the Victoria and Albert Museum's contemporary wing, a $100 million project awaiting British government funding.

Perhaps most impressive is the respect Balmond has won from Philip Johnson, one of the 20th century's architectural titans. Johnson, now 94, is working with Balmond on Chavasse Park, a planned $300 million shopping center in Liverpool. The great man actually calls Balmond "my teacher, my mentor." This from a guy who was whelped by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

"Balmond's mad, he's brilliant, he's changing shapes for the world," Johnson says. Then he sighs theatrically and confides that Balmond will be largely responsible for the look of Chavasse Park, whose tentlike roof will swoop over the organic megastructure. "I gave him free rein, and I didn't really keep up with it," Johnson admits. "It was clear to me that this man knew perfectly what it was I wanted."


At 56, Balmond has reached the very top of his profession. According to the celebrated architects who have worked with him, he not only makes their buildings stand up, but also inspires their designs. He has two advanced engineering degrees from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, and a third from the University of Southampton. He sits on the board of London-based Ove Arup, the most prestigious structural engineering firm in the world. Established in 1946, the company built the iconic Sydney Opera House, the vast Tate Modern museum in London, and the just-completed longest bridge in the world, øresund Fixed Link - a 10-mile-long double-decker that stretches between Sweden and Denmark. Balmond is the chair of Ove Arup's operations division, which puts him in charge of global strategies for research and development and other specialist departments.

Balmond, however, might never get what he wants - public acclaim. It's not his place to be in the public eye. Structural engineers are meant to stay behind the scenes and work to bridge the gap between the architect and the builder. They measure forces and calculate load. They plan a building's foundation and place the columns that will bear its weight. Typically, engineers design the core - that is, the elevators and stairs at the center of a skyscraper - and often the facade as well. When an architect says, "I want glazed bronze glass that lets in only a certain amount of light and looks gold at sunset," it's the engineers who interview window manufacturers and evaluate their cladding systems. The results of this painstaking process are working drawings that spec out every last fixture. Builders can't even begin without them. Balmond's goal - outlined in a monograph, Informal, to be published this June - is to offer a new structure for architecture.



Engineers, as a rule, find glory in structural firsts and feats. Balmond calls it the "macho-ness of structure - the tallest, the thinnest." Ove Arup, in particular, values the big and the bold. Load bearing is made blatantly obvious. "Arup is hi-tech, our traditional image is hi-tech, and the hi-tech aesthetic is a certain belief in structural comprehensibility," he says. "The hi-tech style is right in your face - structure like the mast of a boat or gussets or a tension wire." Working with the British-born, Yale-educated master of hi-tech, Lord Norman Foster, the company gave the $645 million Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headquarters massive cross-bracing in the atrium lobby and giant trusses up its 47-story glass exterior. Completed in 1986, it is considered the epitome of the style.

Balmond is more subversive. He tweaks structure: Where a typical engineer would simply place columns in a grid, he'll slide them off center, or tilt them so they lean as they rise from the floor. He hides structure: Instead of bracing a high-rise with mammoth steel Xs on the exterior, Balmond will turn the building itself into a brace and morph the floors into ramps that distribute the load downward. He invents structure: When Libeskind called for tiling on the Spiral extension of the V&A, Balmond came up with "frac-tiles" - tiles that repeat their shapes in a fractal pattern.

Often, Balmond's engineering solutions affect the form of a building so much that his work is indistinguishable from architecture. Take, for example, the Yokohama International Port Terminal. The London- and Tokyo-based FOA (Foreign Office Architects) - a trendy, young firm going for its first major project - tapped Balmond while competing for the $200 million commission. Balmond came up with an innovative plan that eliminated all columns.

"He said we could do it with a wavy piece of steel," explains Alejandro Zaera Polo, a partner at FOA. The terminal is not yet built, but Balmond's solution has it looking like a huge piece of corrugated cardboard. Koolhaas, who sat on the competition's jury, calls the concept "really beautiful. The shape of the building itself is its structural solution." Balmond's engineering is the architecture, and vice versa. The overlap is so remarkable that to understand Balmond's contribution is to ask: What's the role of the official architect?

I get an answer, of sorts, from the eminent British critic Charles Jencks. In 1997, the BBC asked him for a list of buildings that were transforming architecture. He came up with 15 structures and almost as many architects. Balmond engineered more than a quarter of them. "There's the V&A Spiral, of course, and Rem's Bordeaux villa, and also the library, Jussieu, with Koolhaas, and the stadium at Chemnitz with Ulrich Königs and Peter Kulka," Jencks says, rattling off the buildings that Balmond engineered.

Jencks says that since he made the list, Balmond has only grown more important: "If I were to do it again today I'd have to add Arnhem, a project Balmond did with Ben van Berkel, and the Yokohama terminal, and that project with Philip Johnson in Liverpool. Really," he interrupts himself, "Cecil Balmond is the world's leading thinker on form and structure. He's the power behind the throne."

While interviewing Jencks in his London townhouse, I press the issue. I ask him whether, in the design of those famous buildings, it's Balmond who is really calling the shots. Jencks, who's perched on a sofa across from me, leans forward over a coffee table shaped like the top of a Doric column - a relic of postmodernism, the architectural movement that Jencks made famous - and answers: "To try and decide who did what gets you into the area of libel."

Philip Johnson calls Balmond "my teacher, my mentor." This from a guy who was whelped by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

But that is what Balmond is saying, or at least hinting at, in Informal: New Structure in Architecture. The book, his second, is a manifesto, a call to arms urging his fellow engineers "to release the world of engineering and feel free to enter architecture." The accolades from Koolhaas, Libeskind, Johnson, and Jencks aren't enough anymore: Balmond wants some credit. The book is risky. He's nearly been sued - by FOA - over the credit issue before. And, after all, he is dependent on his good relationships with architects. They are the ones who hire him and bring him in on projects; while the process of making a building is clearly collaborative, the architect is still the star of the show.



Balmond's London office is modest: no prestigious corner, no great views. You'd hardly know he's in charge of 1,700 people. Photos of various Koolhaas projects hang on the wall next to a company-issue poster.

Balmond is bent over some architectural plans. The posture plays up his monkish appearance: He's dressed all in black, hair thinning into a tonsure. The plans are by the Dutch avant-gardist Ben van Berkel - one of a new wave of architects who, in the wake of fellow countryman Rem Koolhaas, are turning the Netherlands into an architectural promised land. The drawings are for the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. The brief calls for a 160,000-square-foot extension and rehab of the existing 200,000-square-foot building on the bank of the Ohio River.

Balmond and van Berkel have been collaborating on the proposal for a month; the competition deadline is in two weeks' time. Balmond's research assistant, Gwenola Kergall, and another Arup engineer, Charles Walker, sit next to him, armed and ready with a ream of sketch paper and a tray of sandwiches cut into quarters. Balmond has called the meeting to go over van Berkel's latest design. They have only a couple of days to analyze this new set of drawings and get back to him.

A month ago, Balmond and van Berkel met to discuss their initial ideas for the center. Van Berkel was toying with some slablike shapes. Sketching out the logic of the site, Balmond scribbled down his idea: two crossing tubes, each with a smaller tube inside. Aligned on the north-south and east-west axes, the outer tubes would drop people in front, link to parking behind, and hide the old structure. The inner tubes would house the exhibits. By their next meeting, van Berkel had jettisoned the slab design for Balmond's schematic. The drawings on Balmond's table today show the Carnegie Science Center as two sets of concentric tubes. Van Berkel has the outside tube folding over to generate the inside tube in an endless skin, almost like a sock rolled back on itself, turning inside out.

Balmond looks at the new plan and shakes his head. In his original sketch, he had the inner tube hanging from the wall of the outer tube - they were joined together. Now, with the folded-over design, the inner tube needs to be held up by columns, and Balmond is irritated that he has to even consider adding any sort of pillar. He's convinced the columns will detract from the building and make it harder to put in exhibition space.

He takes a sheet from the ream and starts to draw, talking in a stream of consciousness as his hand moves. "Supports will interfere with the seamlessness. But it's a tube folded in on itself and will need internal supports. We need a new language for it, but it can't be a separate language. It should have branches like filaments, like tendrils from the wall ..." The drawing he makes to describe the tendrils looks like a swirling red-and-white peppermint.

Kergall suggests a filigree support with an art nouveau look and sketches it out. Balmond nods approval, but still laments. "How can I ruin it with such language?" he demands of Walker and Kergall. "Let's not talk column because I cannot, I can't, I'll die, how can I do that - fold a skin over on itself and then stick columns in?"

This searching for metaphors, this scribbling on paper, this is what Balmond calls "the informal." The informal is Balmond's radical philosophy of engineering; he describes it as "opening the door ... and breaking down the cage." Stripped of metaphor, the informal is Balmond's term for the creative process.

Balmond started reexamining traditional engineering when he turned 40. "It suddenly hit me: I'd been doing this for 20 years without questioning the basic configuration I was dealing with. I'd spent hours minimizing and putting in columns, and architects were saying, 'Oh he's a great guy to work with ...'" Here Balmond trails off. As he hit midlife, engineering became empty. He was winning awards for his buildings - the Merrill Lynch headquarters in London, the Carlsberg Brewery in Northampton - but still felt there was something lacking. He was just making "meaningless containers of form." Searching for a connection between form and meaning, Balmond discovered Pythagoras, the geometer-priest of ancient Greece, and James Gleick's book Chaos.

Inspired, Balmond set out to investigate the mathematical composition of fractals, and soon found that the golden ratio - the basis of Greek architecture - was itself fractal, a pattern repeating endlessly on several different scales. It was the start of a renewed fascination with math, especially its more cabalistic aspects. His first book, Number 9, published in 1998, is a novel with a numerology theme. His study is lined with notebooks filled with fractal patterns and magic squares, sketches that he says "help focus my mind." One binder contains sketch after sketch of bending lines, curves crossing over each other - they look a bit like sine waves. He says they served as the inspiration for the curving supports of the Yokohama terminal.

Right now he's drawing, trying to find some inspiration for the Carnegie Science Center. Sheets of paper are flying, each filled with a tube sketch. He eats as he draws, and indicates for Walker and Kergall to help themselves. Balmond is talking and chewing, trying to find an elegant solution for the central space where the tubes meet. Walker shakes his head, saying that "the complexity of the hub is lost."


Balmond is frustrated. He wants the tubes' intersection to create energy, speed, a sense of velocity. "Spin," he says. He draws swooshing whirlpools and circles over the plan, tracing through the space to get a feel for it. "If you spin from a hub, then you're putting structure into it. It will stand independently and face out." Then he pauses. "Stairs!" he pronounces. "We spin the stairs and shoot off around it!" He arrives at a grand spiral staircase, which serves as a structural support and creates the focal point for the entire building.

He takes another bite of sandwich and moves over to dial van Berkel's office on the speakerphone. The receptionist explains twice that van Berkel is in a meeting with clients, but Balmond insists that she put him through. Once on the phone with van Berkel, it takes Balmond about five minutes to work it out that, yes, van Berkel assumed there would be legs and columns underneath the tubes, which Balmond then corrects with his tendril notion. When he suggests a central vortex with a spiraling staircase, van Berkel replies quietly, "That is what I have in mind, but it's not drawn yet."

Later, Balmond explains the pitfalls of his working style. "The problem is about claiming credit for the architecture. For the record, that's architecture," he says, pointing at the plans on the table, "that's Ben van Berkel." Balmond came up with the crossed-tube plan and then worked out a way to make it feasible, but that detail will fade away. "No one will ever know what Balmond did," he says, using the third person. "Part of an engineer's job description is to remain anonymous."



In conversation, Balmond speaks in a quasi-spiritual patois, peppered with phrases like "tuning in" and "it came to me." He exudes a mystical demeanor that must serve him well while working with big architects and their notoriously big egos.

But Balmond has a big ego, too. It nearly landed him in court, thanks to a messy round of accusations and counter-recriminations over Yokohama. FOA won the competition and started attracting press. "But nobody at FOA mentioned me," he complains. Then the firm chose to work with another engineer for the execution phase of the project, saying, among other things, that Ove Arup was too expensive. "This was the worst episode in my career," Balmond explains, looking down. "Here was an idea that frankly transformed their work. I gave it to them and then, goddamn it, they cut me out!" It's the only time I hear him raise his voice. "It became embarrassing," he adds quietly.

Alejandro Polo of FOA explains from Tokyo that the firm had no choice. "The competition copyright is owned by us, so we had to instruct our lawyer to write a letter saying that we will take court action against them. That was the bitter end of a relationship that probably could have been much better."

Charles Jencks points out that attribution is a touchy issue within architecture. "Even as a professional critic, it's very hard to know who to credit. There's the legal issue of copyright as well as the issue of who actually did it." The bottom line, says Jencks, is that "it's hard for an engineer to get the kind of fame architects do. An engineer isn't asked to be a showman. By necessity and positioning, they are like actors asked to play the secondary role, the Rosencrantz or the Guildenstern. There is an inevitable tension: the architect versus the engineer who forgets his place."

This puts Balmond in a tough position with his new book. "How much do you really say?" he asks rhetorically. "If you write yourself in, you've blown the architect away completely, and I can't do that professionally. I've got to give them more credit than they're due. That's part of the game."

But Koolhaas, who has read an early version of the manuscript, doesn't object. "The book's important. We need it to create the sense of being on the same level," he says. It's no blurb. Koolhaas has twice asked Balmond to join him as business partner and creative equal - working as an architect, not as an engineer.

When I ask Philip Johnson who should get the laurels on the Chavasse Park project, he says, "Cecil always needs to have credit. And why not? He deserves it. What he's doing defies categorization. We need to invent a new word for what he does." Yet Balmond is ambivalent about staking his claim. He's afraid of offending Libeskind and doesn't even want to tell him about the book. There is a chapter that covers the fractal tiles that coat Libeskind's V&A Spiral. In the book, Balmond seems chastened - and doesn't take credit for things that, in private, he says are his. He goes to extremes to sound diplomatic, obscuring credit under the umbrella of "we."

The question of credit would be moot if Balmond left Ove Arup to become an architect. Then there would be no questions about authorship. One evening while sitting in his house, I ask him why he hasn't left, why he hasn't taken Koolhaas up on his offers. He tells me a story: When he was young and just starting his 33-year career at Ove Arup, he fell in love with the guitar. "I started playing classical guitar seriously at 22, and by the age of 30, it was too late - you couldn't become a classical professional," he sighs with regret. "So it's like the guitar. By the time I seriously found out what I wanted, I was in my mid-forties. To be an architect - well, maybe I should have thought about that in my twenties. I don't know."

Balmond puts on some Bach but continues talking over the rising strains of the music, his words clipped but perfectly enunciated. "I know there are some problems now, where I lose out on the ideas and they get taken and appropriated, but I have something deeper than the idea. They take the shape, maybe, but I've got something ahead of them, because structure for me is about the connection of ideas. I want to blaze a new path in the philosophy of structure. That's a bigger agenda than architecture, and I guess that's where I am."