Cecil Balmond: Crossover

Hailed by friend and frequent collaborator Rem Koolhaas as having “almost single-handedly shifted the ground in engineering – and enabled architecture to be imagined differently,” Cecil Balmond has achieved the kind of rock-star status and notoriety that is most often associated with architects. His practice fuses aesthetic form with innovative systems of organization, making the impossible possible and creating new typologies. This newest book outlines more than a dozen international projects: bridges, towers, pavilions, and sculptures that embody the notion of crossover, which Balmond describes as the movement between idea and substance through pattern.

Balmond’s journal notes, sketches, and commentary accompany photographs, drawings, and plans for each project.

The book includes the Weave Bridge at the University of Pennsylvania, a poetic solution to a pedestrian problem; the Serpentine Pavilion at London’s Kensington Gardens; ArcelorMittal Orbit at the site of the 2012 summer Olympics in London; and the CCTV tower in Beijing. Crossover, like its predecessor informal, is destined to become required reading for all students of modern architecture and engineering.