Thinking Outside the Box

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Still, with each project he wants to see how structure can be deployed. In his collaborations he insists on working with architects from the start. “If you do the outside of a building first, it cuts off the building’s possibilities and you’re limited simply to deciding where the columns go to support that facade—it’s all about just refining something,” Balmond says. Not surprisingly, he’s also opposed to the traditional ways engineers work, looking for maximum efficiencies and the positions of beams and trusses. It’s a view that seems ironic given that he’s the deputy chairman of Arup, the world’s largest engineering firm, with 7,000 employees worldwide.

In London, Daniel Bosia, one of AGU’s engineer-architects, guides me through the group’s office. A giant chartreuse fabric flower dominates the space. “It’s a structure with both tension and compression,” he explains. He adds that it looked like a potato chip “until you put the second load on, and now it’s like this.” Bosia gestures to the flower and says that when artist Anish Kapoor saw it he started sketching. Just beyond, a sewing machine stands in a corner. Sheets of paper taped to the far wall are emblazoned with words like complexity and pattern.

“The way we get to a design isn’t through a linear process like optimization or refinement of preconceived form,” Bosia says. “It’s more about discovering a system. H_edge is like that. It’s starting from testing systems—materials systems, numeric systems, and their opportunities in architecture.” To reach such ends they often use fractals and algorithms. The hallmark of an AGU member is perhaps being a math geek. The six-person group includes a computer whiz in virtual reality, mathematicians, and physicists, as well as a couple of architects, Bosia explains. He takes me past a model made of crisscrossing Popsicle sticks, the initial make-up of Shigeru Ban’s Pompidou outpost.

Balmond has two offices—a cramped one down the hall from the AGU and another in Bloomsbury, where he’s next door to the chairman and on the same floor with “the number crunchers,” as he calls them. The space has blue carpet and a gray desk, and just beyond him is the sort of facade he’d scoff at. He does in fact: at one point in our discussion he points at the windows and shakes his head dismissively. A caricature of Balmond, the kind of thing you’d get at a street fair, leans on a bookcase by his desk. In the drawing a devilish-looking Balmond twists a Rubik’s Cube; at the bottom it reads, “Cecil’s cube.” Clearly his fascination with math games isn’t a secret.

Balmond has the look of a slim Buddha, with gray-green eyes and deep lines carved around his mouth. He speaks softly, a hint of his native Sri Lanka in every word. He picks up the spreadsheet he’s studying for his board meeting tomorrow and talks about his role in the business as head of the buildings group, which includes hotels and hospitals, offices, and government and defense contractors among the 13 categories. He waves his hand like a shuttle loom explaining how the different sectors march across the page, and it’s clear how much he enjoys the business side. When asked about which of Balmond’s roles is predominant, business or design, Bosia says, “Cecil’s a businessman first of all. He knows everything has to work in a certain marketplace and that involvement with the business enables a different architecture to be built.”

That Balmond even became an engineer is a fluke. He wanted to be a musician—and didn’t really see engineering as a calling until his late 30s. Born in 1943 and raised in Sri Lanka, he had to choose at 13 between medicine and engineering. And although he won a competition to design a house at 19, he entered it only for the prize—a motorbike. Not long after, he left for Nigeria and then England, where he joined Arup in 1968. It was more than a decade later that he had an awakening to the possibilities of structure while working with James Stirling on the Staatsgal-erie, in Stuttgart.