cecil balmond

• At first, I assumed a certain subservience in engineering, as an enabling science to the act of putting up buildings. There was satisfaction in negotiating its precisions, and only I had X-ray eyes to see into the equations and numbers.Then I began to question what these regular framings of closed squares and rectangles were; were they containers of an empty inanimate space?
• I looked again. I did not believe in this restriction.
• There is a lot more to structure than strict post and beam. Slabs may fold and act as lines of vertical strength, beams may bifurcate and change shape, columns can serve as beams, the ingredients are all there to evolve form in fascinating ways. The chanllenge is to make structure the new discipline in a re-examination of space!!!
• Now the computer opens a door and gives unparalleled freedom to explore - the result is a bewildering a mind behind free-for-all where anything goes. But cool shapes and blobs are nothing more than mere facade if they are propped up by standard post and bem constructions. To create an integrity in the establishing of a free shape a new method is needed for configuration with flexible start points. instead of line - surface; instead of equi-support-scatter; instead of fixed centre-a moving locus; and instead of points-zones.
• Because there is no hierachy, only interdependence, I call this template of ideas informal.
• As we are made of patterns, both random and regular, both phyical and emotional, probing the archetypes of pattern is important - in its recognition and resonance we may find an element of beauty.
• In the past beauty was conditioned by aspects of purity, fixed symmetries and pared minimal structure being accepted as norms. As long as  our brain kept to tramlines of reasoning the model persisted. Now that the world  is being accepted as not simple, the comples and oblique and the interwining of logic strangs gain favour. Reason itself is finally being understood as nascent structure, non-linear and dependent on feedback procedures. Beauty may lie in the actual processes of engagement and be more abstract than the aesthetic of objecthood. Ultimately it may really be a constructive preocess.