Thinking Outside the Box

The astonishing structural engineering of Arup's Cecil Balmond

by Jennifer Kabat

On a warm day this fall structural engineer Cecil Balmond stands in a Soho gallery surrounded by a huge metal fence. Chains rise miraculously from the ground—others float in midair. There is nothing supporting them. They’re neither hung from the ceiling nor secured to the floor, but instead are held in place by tension from steel plates that look like abstract gingerbread men. The installation, called H_edge, actually resembles a futuristic privet hedge from a postvegetation world out of Mad Max. Created by Balmond and his Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, the piece is nearly eight feet high in places and turns the gallery into a maze while casting bird- and flowerlike shadows on the floor and walls.

Balmond says the installation “was inspired by the Indian rope trick, from a model on Francis’s desk” and gestures to Francis Archer, a tall man with the tweedy aspect of an Oxford don. Archer had been a quantum physicist at Cambridge before he moved to math and then engineering, joining Arup. He shoves his hands in his pockets and tells me about the Chicago Tribune’s 1890 hoax: the story of an Indian holy man who threw a rope in the sky; a boy climbed up after it, and his body parts rained down on the transfixed crowd. Minus the body parts, it’s a good analogy for Balmond’s work—creating mythic-seeming structural possibilities.

Balmond—his hair balding into a tonsure, the overhead lights reflecting off the top of his head—smiles his gap-toothed grin. He explains how they’d used a fractal, a Menger sponge, to shape the H_edge’s maze so it repeats the pattern exactly throughout the space at different scales. Balmond has been the engineer for some of architecture’s most influential structures—both built and unbuilt—like Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV tower, in Beijing, and Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Balmond was also the cocreator of four of the pavilions the Serpentine Gallery builds each summer in Hyde Park. Now he’s developing master plans in London and St. Petersburg, and designing buildings. His first, a bridge in Coimbra, Portugal, opened last November and hardly looks like the work of an engineer—no wires, no trusses, no obvious structure. Balmond has taught at Harvard and Yale, and now has a permanent chair at Penn. He is arguably the most famous structural engineer alive, with name recognition akin to that of the architects he works with—Koolhaas, Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Àlvaro Siza, Shigeru Ban. Koolhaas has worked with Balmond on nearly every project and competition OMA has undertaken—more than 30 collaborations—since the mid-1980s, when they first met. “That number alone is evidence of the interest and shared passion for a particular kind of research,” Koolhaas says.

“There’s no one else like him,” Libeskind says. “He’s exploring the whole issue of structure and pattern. It’s not just using virtual reality and computers—there is a whole ban-alization of architecture where people are just playing games and inventing ludicrous shapes. But with Cecil it’s not just a pretty facade with a different shape and traditional structure.”

In a real sense Balmond is at war with the box, with those pretty facades and blobby buildings. Form for its own sake isn’t good enough for him—nor is creating a new shape without rethinking the underlying structure. His solutions inevitably have an enormous impact on buildings, but it’s not as if he wants them to look like “feats of engineering.” Instead they appear so integral to each project that you can’t tell the engineering from the architecture. Which brings up all sorts of authorship questions. “The whole question of influence in my view is barely relevant,” Koolhaas says. “And I would even say so is the issue of authorship.” The issue nearly got Balmond sued by a young firm he worked with in the late 1990s when it accused him of taking too much credit for the work.