CROSSOVERCecil Balmond

PRESTEL

MUNICH • LONDON • NEW YORK

PREFACE

This is not a book about Cecil Balmond. Though rich with his plans, sketches, written notes and detailed theoretical excursions, it is less a compendium or a reader than it is a project in its own right, which is to say, a project by Cecil Balmond. Balmond is globally renowned as an engineer and architect, but he also has a deep investment in the book form, the book as medium. If his guiding philosophy might be understood to be exploration itself – an ethos that crosses and synthesises the fields of art, design, engineering, physics, biology and mathematics – then it is only natural that the medium of the book should find its place at the very heart of his activity.

For the book is nothing if not an arena, a laboratory, a test site and a place where – by way of the only apparently straightforward selection of content and its arrangement in the space of successive pages – new exchanges and ideas can emerge. The book is a launch pad for what Balmond has, in conversation with me, referred to as an ‘alchemy of ideas’. Experimentation is, after all, the putting of things together to see what happens.

Many among Balmond’s earlier books – including Number 9, informal and Element – have inspired artists from Anish Kapoor to Olafur Eliasson to Koo Jeong-A, and I think it is in large part because of this palpable sense that one has when reading them that this, the space of the page, is where ideas take form. The page is where the simple becomes complex, and complexity is key to Balmond’s thinking, and his aesthetic: ‘I’ve been interested in working with the contemporary sense of flux, about how complexity can happen without any preciousness’, he has revealed to me.

For Balmond himself, the books are sites where ideas are worked on and worked through, but they are also toolboxes for the many other practitioners who draw from them. His books achieve what Michel Foucault aspired to with his

own: ‘I would like my books to be a kind of toolbox which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area… I don’t write for an audience, I write for users.’

The book is a privileged form for Balmond precisely because of its exploratory and communicative aspect, its status as a discursive object. Because his meta-medium, if you like, is mediation itself. He has explained to me, ‘I am interested in probing the inner fibres and structures of organisation’. ‘Resonance’ and ‘synonymity’ are among Balmond’s keywords, and this because ‘complexity is irreducible’:

‘You cannot categorise, you cannot compartmentalise, you have to embrace the entire thing.’

Balmond mediates between complex flights of imagination and the spatial, geographic, demographic, biological and economic demands of reality. He mediates between the two dimensional and the three and four dimensional, and the eleven dimensional of superstring theory; between the work on paper and the work in space. He does this, in turn, by mediating between the disciplines themselves, and his command of each is nothing short of astounding in a world where increasingly we are forced in our professional lives to specialise, to find our niche and stick to it, to stay firmly within our comfort zone.

Balmond has many parallel realities. Engineering is far more than simply a ‘reality check’ on architecture and spatial imagination. Across his work, he has convincingly debunked the myth of structural engineering as the purely rational, ‘non-creative’ counterpart to the artistry of architecture.

He has told me: ‘The fundamental problem is that if engineering is only seen only as a technical, calculating effort then it has nothing to do with invention, creativity. This is false. Structural engineering, moreover, is so un-intimate that I prefer to use the word structure. It’s more about rhythm,

fluctuations or episodes in space: this is what structures do… Structure, itself, is the driving force that makes the architecture.’

The spectrum of human knowledge today remains, for the most part, divided between spheres of learning that are sharply divisible as the ‘arts’ and the ‘sciences’. Balmond does as much as anyone to question what for most of us appears as the inevitability and inexorability of this grand division. ‘I am mainly interested in the overlap zone between art and science,’ he has said to me.

I have had many conversations with Balmond ever since our first meeting with Rem Koolhaas in the late 1990s, and to listen to him speak is to hear inspiration at work, drawn from the panoply of creative fields; philosophy, physics, music: ‘I started reading Wittgenstein and then I came across Gödel… Gödel liberated me completely and so did Bach…’

Hans Ulrich Obrist

12 MARSYAS

76 SERPENTINE

152 DANZER

190 WEAVE

218 COIMBRA

294 GRETNA

314 CONCEPTUAL MODELS

324 H_EDGE

376 CCTV

488 PAVILION

510 CROSSOVER

208 NOTES FROM THE EDGE OF SPACE

522 MASTERPLAN

596 TEMENOS

616 TIME AND DIMENSION

626 TAICHUNG

674 ORBIT

692 SEQUENCE AND SERIES

INTRODUCTION

The unknown is dark, and potent, a blank zone knotted up. Jump in, pull out a strand of invention, in the light of understanding – merely a local event – fabricate a shape and contour. But buried in the effort of making will be traces of the dark centres, the irrational carried within a fact.

We have a duty to sense this and allocate higher powers to the mundane.

Frameworks of lines, beams and columns are also shock absorbers, streams of current and contour maps. Glass, concrete, steel are common materials but also exceptional, if part of narrative thread in transparency, tension field and crushing force. Structure itself creates episodes, in the punctuation of space and offers skin, bone and muscle to enclosure. Projects become explorations of space, a philosophy of practice as experiment. Objecthood in a static universal sense gets denied, the author of the building is not an artist, more a researcher: an attitude that keeps one focused on the material at hand, its shaping connections, its innate mystery.

Ideas may be many but our means of production are limited. A few materials, a series of catalogues on products, manuals of engineering and architecture practice – so easy to hide behind the convention – but also too easy to believe in computer-driven infoscapes as revelations that give answers. Design fixes to no science or art; the process governs itself with singularities and opportunism.

Conflict between an ideal and the pragmatic continually probes and compiles what I call an aesthetic forensic. It is a honed in tool which investigates balance between the poetic and the essential. If risk is taken beauty lies somewhere on its edge. If we design secure with repeat formulas the work reduces to the readily acceptable. There will be no new intuitions to space and form. Repeat corrupts, experiment revives.

In between are intangibles that overlap practice with theory – I call them informal radicals – as limit turns to threshold, symmetry to invariance, rational to irrational, equilibrium to number, they infiltrate Crossover. They are the projects.

Each of them must have safety, risk and danger attached, as ideas translate into realities and metaphors into substance.

This book picks up where informal left off, on its last page. A diagram there proposed metaphor linked to substance through a negotiation of pattern, not a decorative but a field condition of organising powers.

Crossover explores the fiction of this reality and the fact of its speculation.

Architecture and engineering, hide behind the masks of their disciplines. But art, mathematics and myth infiltrate with symbols and codes so that the real is full of the imaginary anyway.

Cecil Balmond London, August, 2013

To Anish Kapoor, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind,

Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura whose work is

featured here, I am indebted. The designers and their inventions

propelled the dialogues in the first instance. They encouraged

an open investigation between engineering and architecture

and art and their inputs were the fertile ground upon which

‘Crossover’ took hold. As with all creativity there are no

boundaries and their design imagination directly influenced my

own explorations into space and matter, organisation and outcome.

MARSYAS LONDON UK

a tympanum stretching tensioning — constant inversion

or mythic fabrication?

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Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Unilever Series, 2002

Artist: Anish Kapoor

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Marsyas turns and arcs into space

funnelling down its throat only to

expand again, leap the void and

beam across, resist the elements

and stretch back to earth. A tale

of span and closure absorbs all:

structure runs in hidden currents.

For which line of force is now

sinew or muscle? The guessing

game goes on between shape and

form, substance and metaphor.

The imagination is primed between

a reality of the void and the fiction

of its substance.

Is it steel or fabric or river of blood?

That a piece of cloth makes this

levitation possible is remarkable.

Structure is forgotten, even sculpture

in the conventional sense is lost.

Art, architecture and engineering

emerge in one precision.

Unseen forces disturb the air.

And Marsyas takes shape filling up

Tate Modern, to offer the brooding

perception that art is the dark

primary for the emergence of space.

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Looks like steel

made from fabric

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Kapoor and I discussed many a time

the difference between ‘shape’ and

‘form’. The words are used loosely

to mean the same thing, the image

of what we see or look at; but even

in the words ‘see’ and ‘look’ there

are differences. Seeing infers a

continuum, a desire to study, to

make critical comment. To look is

momentary, more discrete. Outward

contours make up the shape, but

beyond that moment of geometry

a deeper inspiration feeding off a

sense of buried order forges

something else — ‘form’ — a poetic

principle rather than the actual

thing. Shape has no depth trapped

to its outward layer but form has

shadows of deep structure, more to

do with instinct than visualisation.

Yet the search begins with shapes

as they are the descriptors. Only

later do the codes and attributes

of form arise, and the judgements

one makes as to whether the idea is

robust or trivial.

Haunting obsessions...

25

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PROTOTYPES

To realise such a work (probably the biggest contemporary sculpture in the world and most likely the longest spanning fabric structure) boundaries fall between art and structure. Kapoor and I swam in the same currents, looking for inspiration and harsh pragmatics: endless conversations — they should have been taped.

Unfashionable words like ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’

enter the discussion serving as a rough litmus test to abrade, colour, and check out gut instinct against the obvious or expedient. In the end, a mystery, something does feel right.

The devil is that so much else also feels right, first time around. Then certainties give way and tentacles of doubt run nervous ends around the models. How like gods we hope to relish the perfect act!

To begin with, we looked at three shapes. I called them the Bean, Two Drums, Long Spine.

The Bean was to stick out on each side over the mezzanine of the Turbine Hall, a structure that travelled a length of 120 m. (The Turbine

Hall is 150 m in length.) Kapoor asked that the Bean could be entered into from the

mezzanine platform, to seek an inversion, from exterior to interior.

There was a similar suggestion for the next idea

on the table, the Two Drums. This was not unlike Kapoor’s project at the Baltic; here

doubling the cylindrical shape and placing it horizontally, to each side of the mezzanine,

left and right — two parts sucking and pulling but one composition.

Though the Two Drums filled up the Turbine Hall, something we desired, the idea looked like

a repeat so we put this to one side, and went back to the Bean to look at it further.

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But where would the cladding be? On the inside, so that an exoskeleton is what the visitor sees first; or the other way around, with the surface on the outside and its supporting structure on the inside? The latter would make the interior look scattered, finely dispersed, and would have the look of fuzz.

And what if this exterior skin was something hard? Imagine interior space frame modules that make up the shape being bolted together, with

a fine mesh placed over them externally, then a foam material sprayed on. The technique would provide a smoothness on the outside, once trowelled down, but rough unfinished textures on the interior – too rough?

But placing the skin on the inside and having an external web of steel could suggest some kind of halo around the surface. If the surface did not need to have a smooth curvature, flat metal panels could be fitted with gaps between them,

which would initiate facets to a curving geometry. The question was, depending on the scale of the facets, would the individual

panels jerk the contour too much or infer a smoothness?

The metaphors of fuzz and halo were important. They served as beacons to aim at, to keep alive the search. Otherwise the work could descend into nothing more than a utility of

rods, panels, nuts and bolts.

Then a more interesting idea emerged – how about a single layer of structure that has

a piece of fabric stretched over it, and the air sucked out from the inside, revealing the

diamond ribbing of a steel mesh through the fabric?

We called this Cocoon. Everyone liked it. It seemed the right direction to go in, if we

were to develop the Bean further.

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Cocoon — fabric skin stretched

over interior steel work

Stress model

External ‘halo’ option3

3

Then there was the Long Spine — a spinal tap into the energies of the Turbine Hall. What intrigued me was its contrariness; a catenary sag on the top against the curves below of two arches.

In the first sketch and model the Spine was clamped onto the mezzanine. You could pass from the Turbine Hall, up the mezzanine steps, and look in or enter the hollow belly. Again, here was the wish to look at the object and find a narrative with its interior.

In its entirety the Long Spine, made of fabric, would be a plastic warp against the mechanical and rectilinear interiors of Tate Modern. The Two Drums were now a distant memory. The Bean and Cocoon, though fascinating, were put on the shelf for another time.

But what if the Long Spine could do more — if the fabric could unclamp itself and lift off, hang through space, end to end?

The form billowing out over the mezzanine would now hang low over the visitor’s head. It could bifurcate too in the lateral direction, drawing

a new horizon; the deep sag defining the longitudinal, the cleft belly engaging a transverse.

The cleavage would run the length of the Turbine Hall. In the computer render it looked

shocking, sexual.

Kapoor supposed the fabric was mirrored;

then the surface would recede and unravel in reflective geometries. There could be

dimensions beyond the shape itself, it would have been amazing.

But a mirror surface was going to be unforgiving of any blemish. A sample hung in the studio proved this, it creased easily. And soon, the mirror idea had to be abandoned as risky, if

absolute smoothness could not be guaranteed.

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An ambition to test the limit of

fabric across the length of the

Turbine Hall triggered the idea for

lift-off and one long hang. But how

could the skin swell up, be round

and cleft at the same time?

The first thought that came to

mind was a tension cable inside,

which could pull the shape inwards

to create the bifurcation.

The same way tension fibres

on the walls of a biological cell

pull at the membrane, to fold

it inwards and begin mitosis or

cell division.

To maintain the bulge we planned

eight tonnes of polyurethane pellets

thrown in as ballast, to fatten up the

profiles, and get what we wanted

from the shape.

But the question remained, would

the contour of the cleft be spiked or

rounded and smooth. How accurate

could the predictions be; would the

interior ballast of pellets become

lopsided producing a shape that

would bulge in the wrong place?

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We looked at other ways to swell the form; nothing worked. The problem was that a weight

in the sacs pulled the profile into a kidney shape. I had assumed a rounded shape.

Ballast acts like hydraulic pressure and grows with depth, in a steady incremental manner,

pushing sideways against anything that contains it. The triangular vertical distribution of force

places a bias in the profile that contains the ballast. (Imagine a sack of goods — it is

lump shaped, not rounded everywhere.) I had got it wrong.

As a last resort we thought of pumped air to give even curvature, a fat roundness. Was this right, to look at the external and not know how it was shaped — would the idea of ‘forming’ be

lost because the source was unseen?

The work we felt had to be understood more explicitly.

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If the form is cut open above the mezzanine,

elliptical ring — to pull down at the edges — there is

even weight runs around the centre. The inside or

belly of the piece. The hover above one’s head seems

closed chamber. It would be as if the work were a giant

UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Cecil Balmond, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Crossover

Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, 720 Seiten, 14,5x18,5800 farbige AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-4522-2

Prestel

Erscheinungstermin: September 2013

Struktur ist Architektur Cecil Balmond nimmt unter den Ingenieur-Architekten der Gegenwart eine Sonderstellung ein.Seit mehr als 40 Jahren beschäftigt sich der charismatische Querdenker mit Fragen zu Statikund Tragwerksplanung und gelangt dabei zu genialen Lösungen, die so gewagte Konstruktionenwie Rem Kohlhaas’ CCTV-Tower in Peking oder Shigeru Bans Centre Pompidou Metz erstmöglich machen. »CROSSOVER« ist der Schlüssel zum Verständnis von Balmonds Werk. Beiseiner Suche nach Mustern und Strukturen als Grundlage jedes Gebäudes verlässt er sich nichtnur auf die klassischen Felder der Ingenieurswissenschaft, sondern erkennt auch in Musik, Naturund Chaosforschung verwertbare Formen für eine völlig neu gedachte Architektur.