To be told that 'your work is so invisible' by a fellow professional, and take it as a huge compliment, seems strange. Yet when it comes to Cecil Balmond - the London-based Sri Lankan structural engineer, Chairman of the European division of international firm of consulting engineers Ove Arup & Partners for the past 30 years and Saarinen Professor at Yale - the remark means that his original ideas about form have influenced his high-level collaborations with world-famous architects -without disturbing their egos. In fact, his collaborators queue to sing his praises. 'Perhaps as only a non-European could,' says leading Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, 'Cecil has destabilised and even toppled a tradition of Cartesian stability'. These descriptions suggest a quietly subversive role for Balmond, a polymath who is passionate about the role of maths and music in the creative overlap between science and art. His organising skills in transforming line into plan and topology are much sought after and as far-sighted in design terms, perhaps, as Kandinsky's point, line and plane art works were in the 1920s.
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