Cecil Balmond, Sri Lankan Born Engineer Architect Hailed as One of the Most Important Forces in Contemporary Architecture Today

Issue 6, www.serendipitymag.com, By Afdhel Aziz, Pix ©Arup/Thomas Graham

Architecture is no longer simply about buildings to live and work in; it is a direct extension of our human identity, a reflection of who we are as a species - and who we hope to become. In the world of contemporary architecture, it is always the architects who are the stars of the show. Whether it’s Daniel Libeskind sharing his soaring vision of the Liberty Tower in New York, or Frank Gehry revealing the truly awe-inspiring ripples and curves of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain – it’s the architects who get the spotlight. But just as the buildings they create rely on a strong inner core to keep their shimmering facades aloft, the architects themselves have to rely on their more pragmatic - and reticent - alter ego: the engineer.

All too often, they are a breed for whom invisibility is a pre-requisite. But amongst star architects around the world, there is one name that is repeated again and again: Cecil Balmond. This soft spoken Sri Lankan-born engineer has risen through the ranks to become the engineer of choice amongst the architectural cognoscenti.

But when you begin to investigate his world, you soon begin to realise that his approach isn’t just rooted in the hard realities of construction - stresses and strains, mathematics and physics - but in a more lyrical aesthetic that, like the buildings he gets involved in, isn’t all that it appears to be on the surface. He is an astronaut, in the purest, rarest sense of the word; an explorer of space.

The story of Cecil Balmond begins in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in the 1940’s where his father Hugh was a history lecturer and his mother taught piano. The young Balmond was much like any other young boy his age, playing cricket and gudu in the dusty street outside his house, immersed
in ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ by Arthur Conan Doyle and lying on the parapet wall at night looking up at the myriad patterns in the stars above him.

At age 10, his father was elevated to a new job at the University of Peradeniya, in Kandy and his universe changed. The heat and dust of Colombo were left behind, for the green terraced paddy fields and lush vegetation, of moonlight creating ghosts in the trees, growing up to the sounds of the Benny Goodman Quartet playing ‘Whispering Diana’ on his father’s Bush Black Box valve phonogram. All in all, a weaving together of influences and memories for the young Cecil, that played their part later on in his life.

Fast forward to the present, and at 56, Cecil is probably at the top of his game. He has two advanced engineering degrees from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and a third from the University of Southhampton. He is also deputy Chairman of Ove Arup and Partners, probably the most dominant architectural engineering firm of the last forty years, from their work on the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, to the Tate Modern in London and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters in Hong Kong, plus key projects around the world too numerous to mention.

He teaches and lectures at architectural schools all over the world, and is the author of several books, most intriguingly Number 9, a fascinating journey into the world of mathematics seen from the point of view of a young boy.

But to get an idea of just how stellar a talent Balmond is, you need to leave behind the dry as dust list of achievements and accreditations and look to those who swear by him - the architects. Nowadays, good contemporary architecture occupies a space in our lives like good food or fine wine; architects are the new master chefs, the new winemakers, and we appreciate their latest creations the way we’d appreciate a new dish from a Michelin 3 star chef. And amongst the truly famous architects, Balmond’s is the name to drop.

Architectural superstar Rem Koolhaas has worked with Balmond on more than 30 projects since the mid-1980’s, including the three that have made Koolhaas name - the Bordeaux villa, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, and the new Seattle Public Library. Today Koolhaas wont even start a project until he has consulted with Balmond . “When we work together, there’s more to it than an engineer saying you need a column here, support there...Cecil has changed my outlook on structure and enabled me to re-think architecture.”

If most engineers begin to approach a problem with a structured, logical, left brain approach, Balmond’s speciality is doing the opposite - starting with the intuition, with emotion, with all those right brain qualities that engineers aren’t supposed to deal in.

German Daniel Libeskind whose controversial design for the Liberty Tower in New York has made him a household name, recently collaborated with Balmond on the Spiral, an imaginative extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s contemporary wing in London. Even though political wrangling has crippled the project, the critics have been unanimous in their admiration for the design, a decentred spiral that explodes onto the street in a startling façade.

As Libeskind describes it ‘The Spiral Extension to the Victoria & Albert Museum shares in the spirit of the twin inscription carved on Cromwell Tower Entrance, Inspiration and Knowledge, and carries that message into concrete space and its content.

The building goes beyond the habitual division between program and history, form and function, architecture and engineering, by offering new possibilities within the horizon of an evolving cultural and educational resource.’ And according to him, he couldn’t have created it without Balmond’s input.

“He’s a thinker, a mystic, he’s not your average engineer brought from the outside to check things out. He’s there with us from the very beginning with his keen insights and his keen design ability. Most engineers don’t see engineering as an evolving adventure in design, but Cecil does.”

But there’s the inherent paradox in Balmond at the moment. He is at the top of his game - but one gets the impression that he wants to change the game itself. No longer is the quiet, behind-the-scenes role of engineer enough for him - no more Best Supporting Oscars.

He has got into trouble before with previous architectural partners over the provenance of ideas and ownership of concepts, when he went to court with Foreign Office Architects over a project in Yokohama; after having won the contract with Balmond’s input being essential to their work, they cut him out of the project and started working with another structural engineer for the execution, claiming that Balmond and Arup were too expensive. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

He has issued his manifesto, a book entitled ‘Informal: New Structure in Architecture’, in which he urges his fellow engineers to ‘ release from the world of engineering, and feel free to enter architecture’.

He has fans in high places. Koolhaas himself has twice asked Balmond to join him as business partner and creative equal, working as architect and creative equal. So far, Balmond has resisted the temptation - but who knows, one day, he may come out of the limelight and join the pantheon of names that shape the existence of our cities - and of our lives.