study.....
get involved.....
people.....
n e w s
How Buildings Stand Up
24 March 2009 / Sanford Kwinter/ Building Design
Beneath the dense and multidimensional appearances of our world lies an endless cascade of numbers, an irrigating flood of numerical updates, cross-references, algorithmic feeds, averages, and distributions; they do not interact with one another through the predictable linear protocols of classical geometry, but behave more like the mysterious webs and catalytic reactions of chemistry...
...The display is saturated with exquisite demonstrations and concrete architectural details, models, video clips, animations, algebraic demonstrations, and speculations on the nature and future of form. It also contains the room-filling quasi-crystal structure Danzer, in which every glyptic facet connects with, and participates in, the articulation of every other in an unstoppable, but this time imploding, fractal cascade.
But Balmond’s world is not exclusive, and while his deepest current inclinations tend toward dissymmetry and disequilibrium (extreme architectural performance), he does not shy from including loyal reflections on classical proportion and balance, or even on the numerological curiosities of quasi-science (which, to be fair, did not frighten Newton either).
Balmond is one of those rare engineers with a license to speculate, to experiment and invent, and not only to solve. His emerging specialty is the architectural “thought experiment”: As director of the Advanced Geometry Unit at Britain’s Arup engineering firm and now as an independent designer himself, he is a collaborator on high-profile “hypotheses” such as the Libeskind, Koolhaas, Ito, and Siza pavilions for London’s Serpentine Gallery, and he designed the Coimbra pedestrian bridge in Portugal, his first solo project. While his business is numbers, his vocation is form. And he knows that the relationship between the two is where the openness of life and nature reside. His exhibition is a form of scientific autobiography for the generation of designers—curiously, mostly in advanced phases of their careers—that is just beginning to emerge revolutionized and reborn...Read Full Article
image references: Alex Fradkin, Deborah Wilk, Shonquis Moreno,