The Way of the Wobble 
Peter Campbell
- Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the 20th Century by Peter Jones Buy this book
The meal is over. On the tablecloth there are corks, an orange, a few walnut shells, an empty glass and a coffee spoon. Those of us whose instinct is to see if we can somehow balance these objects, one on the other, are generally found to be annoying. Conversation falters. People wait for over ambitious configurations to collapse. Structural doodling is our way of playing at being engineers. We search for the point of balance as weight is transferred from one item to another. We load a folded card or a drinking straw until it buckles, replicating in miniature tests made with hefty presses and rigs in the basements of engineering schools.
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Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
At Tate Modern · Louise Bourgeois
At Somerset House · Islamic art
In Auvergne · sketching out of doors
At the National Gallery · Titian
At the National Gallery · Pompeo Batoni
At the National Portrait Gallery · Painting the Century
At the British Museum · Dürer
At Tate Modern (and elsewhere) · How architects think
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