Every month, Balmond Studio publishes TiP (Thinking in Practice). It is entirely separate from the studio’s work, acting as a forensic in aesthetics, intelligence and identity including essays, Q&A’s, profile pieces and so on. Read some excerpts below:

Cecil Balmond, Issue 3

When we think of nature in design, often we think of copying it: a tree, a leaf, or a river motif say. For me it’s not about nature in the romantic sense, the inspiration is at the source point. I’ve always been intrigued by the abstract, the root of form making as it happens, and the first constructor of this, in nature, is totally an algorithmic puzzle. As a result, I looked deeply into how things are built, starting with atomic structure and then of course DNA. How does the same composition give a variety: H2O – water, ice moisture; silicates giving all the variety to the minerals of the world; how do we, plans and trees all happen to have the same idea of DNA with the same protein bases in them?

At the source, it is a structuring in space to a geometry and placed in a discrete arithmetic. We and everything around us are made by compilation, by aggregations which have sequences within them. And since we are made of these beginnings, I believe our brains are wired to recognize this.