Some people keep a diary

Cecil Balmond is a structural engineer, teacher, and author. He is the deputy chairman of Ove Arup and Partners and one of the firm's Fellows, and in that capacity has collaborated with many of the world's leading architects over the past three decades on some of the planet's most celebrated and daring projects. He is the author of the delightful book, Informal (2007), in which he opens with "Some people keep a diary":

"Others, like me, find the daily minutiae too meaningless to record with its small traffickings up and down. But if one looks back over time and runs a memory record of a project through one's mind, a diary of sorts takes shape. In serial fashion, key events milestone the project - changes, dead-ends, parallel lines of enquiry, the conclusions and ambitions of that first inception - moments of importance that turn into only a few days of recollection. Looking back on the Bordeaux project, I remember only Eight Days. And with each day the long hours of criticism, the short seconds of inspiration, the tug of all those movements that push and pull each way as what we call The Project ticks on."