Latent Patterns

Cecil Balmond has been working with the international firm of consulting engineers Ove Arup and Partners for the past thirty years. He has collaborated with some of the world's most influential architects as James Stirling, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Liberskind, etc. on a variety of celebrated and award-winning architectural projects. Balmond, however, has never got corresponding prestiges since being a structure engineer normally meants to stay behind the scene and work for bridging the gap between the architect and the builder. Until his new book informal was published in 2002, Balmond began to receive the same honor as his architect partners. Informal is a collection of manifesto, theory, templates, diary, and case studies on his collaborations with architects on some of the most innovative architecture in recent times. Balmond takes 'informal' as an approach to the design of a form that is non-linear. He uses three characteristics to describe 'informal'.As my research goes further, I find informal is quite ambiguity, because for Balmond informal is to embrace the complexity and not to be constrained in self-contained categories of definition. In fact, his fundamental interest in "pattern" is much more important, gives a new birth to structure design. And his peculiar role between architect and engineer throws a light into the current fragmental architecture situation.And his first book, Number 9 - the search for the Sigma code, unveils the mysterious properties of the number 9 and shows the uncanny way it occupies in the organization of number. Balmond seeks out the organizations in numbers and ties them to the making of forms and patterns. In a world in which the mathematics has become, since stopped being a simple symbol of cosmic order for long, synonymous with the prosaic and instrumental, Balmond's work discloses the resonance of abstract, formal revelations with human truths. Consequently, based on projects analyzing, this paper introduces Balmond's unique way of using pattern into structural design, and asking for its inspiration for current architecture situation.