Thinking Outside the Box

(page 3 of 5)

Balmond convinced higher-ups at Arup, mentors like the legendary engineer Peter Rice, that the gallery shouldn’t have columns; but after Stirling won the competition, Balmond decided to use them. “Not because I’d lost my will, but I could see how they would help your experience of space.” Now when discussing structure, he describes it musically as “syncopation.” Talking about the Kunsthal, his first built project with Koolhaas, Balmond says that the red zigging and zagging ceiling beams go “cheung, choong, choong.” He looks up from his drawing. “Those rhythms determine how you read space, and only after the patterns are set do I look for a materiality or how to connect in the system. It’s a reversal from how I would have done it thirty years ago when I would have just looked for where to put the columns.”

Crucial in that change has been his work with Koolhaas. The two met shortly after Balmond finished the Staatsgalerie. Koolhaas had completed only one building when he came to Balmond about a competition. “Rem was shooting from the hip, taking no prisoners—an intense guy, and I liked him immediately,” Balmond says. The two became close friends. Koolhaas was interested in interrogating the expectations of structure, Balmond in how structure impacted architecture. Now, Koolhaas says, “Cecil has a much more profound understanding of architecture, and I a much more profound understanding of structure. That creates a situation where we simultaneously talk about both and where ideas can be launched from either side in either domain. Collaborating with Cecil has allowed us not to differentiate our architecture but to produce a different architecture, yeah?” He waits for me to nod. “An architecture that is more fundamentally engaged with issues of structure than many of our colleagues’.”

Balmond pushes his chair out and calls for his assistant to bring a book he wants. He returns to sketching the Kunsthal, before drafting a box with crisscrossing lines on it for Ito’s Serpentine gallery. The temporary structure is perhaps the best expression of Balmond’s approach to numbers and engineering. “If you look, you can’t see what we did,” he says. He points to a photo of a building covered in a filigree of lines. “At the start Ito said, ‘Let’s have a box’—but what kind of box? So we go, ‘Okay, box, what’s different there?’ And at first we both drew some random lines on the roof.” He sketches out crosshatchings and a colonnade. “But when I was looking at it, I thought, A roof on stilts? That didn’t feel right, and if you’re drawing random lines, your own bias comes in. People can’t create the random.”

Instead Balmond started to think about an algorithm they could use. He laughs and says, “I know when I say algorithm it sounds like”—he makes a stagy gasp—“algorithms are the new science. But they’re nothing new. Algorithms are the oldest thing in the world. If you count, it’s an algorithm, 1 + 1, 1 + 1 + 1. Our numbers are algorithmic. If you do any ballroom dancing, if you repeat yourself in a sequence, that’s an algorithm.” He was looking for something to serve as the engine to drive their search. Balmond draws a square and takes a line from the middle of one side to a third of the way down the next side. “If you keep doing that over and over and over, half to a third, half to a third, you get this shape.” It looks like an asymmetric diamond. “See,” he says and sketches another square where he divides the line in half. “A steeple is just taking half to a half.” And indeed his rotating square looks remarkably like the inside of a steeple.

With the pavilion, “I wasn’t finding structure, I was looking for a pattern first. I knew this pattern could be a structure because of that steeple drawing, but it’s not architecture, it’s a pure algorithm run six times. To make it a piece of architecture, I want a network of lines.” His pen scratches on the paper as he extends the lines so they join outside the square. That diagram became his model. He cut out the four corners so it would fold over. “And voilà,” Balmond says, “I’ve got a box.”