I’m Patrick Rimbault, a structural and façade engineer working at the intersection of architecture, craft, and advanced digital workflows. My work is driven by a simple belief: structure should feel inevitable — the natural resolution of forces, materials, and intent.
I specialise in expressive, technically rigorous structures and façades, shaped by experience across South Africa and Europe. My approach blends conceptual clarity with deep technical understanding, always aiming for engineering that strengthens design rather than constraining it.
Philosophy
Structure as craft: I design with clarity, rigour, and buildability so engineering elevates architecture and endures in practice.
Clarity
Clear ideas lead to clear structures. I prioritise legible load paths, honest materials, and drawings that communicate intent. Clarity invites collaboration and strengthens architectural expression.
Rigour
Rigour is the discipline behind good engineering — careful assumptions, precise analysis, and responsible detailing. It ensures that expressive architecture performs as beautifully as it looks.
Buildability
Buildability is where design meets reality. It includes detailing, fabrication logic, tolerances, site logistics, transport constraints, procurement routes, qualitative cost drivers, and early visibility of risk.
Buildability is not cost obsession — it is cost and risk transparency, ensuring that ambitious architecture remains deliverable, durable, and investable.
Design Partnership
Engineering is a design discipline. The best outcomes emerge from early, generous collaboration between architects, engineers, fabricators, and builders. I approach every project as a shared authorship.
Digital & Analogue Craft
Digital tools expand our ability to explore, test, and refine. Parametric modelling, FEM, and integrated workflows allow rapid iteration and deeper understanding.
But analogue tools remain essential. The pencil, the sketchbook, the loose sheet of paper — these are where intuition lives. The shortest route between the mind and the page is through the pen, and many of my most creative insights emerge in those early hand‑drawn studies.
Analogue intuition and digital precision are not opposites; together they form a design process that is exploratory, disciplined, and deeply connected to the craft of engineering.
Experience
I am a registered Professional Engineering Technologist (PrTechEng) with ECSA in South Africa and Graduate Member of the Institution of Structural Engineers (GIStructE) in the UK.
I currently work with Bellapart in Catalonia, designing advanced façades and complex architectural structures at the highest level.
What I’m Exploring
- Conceptual structural studies of well‑known architectural projects
- The relationship between digital workflows and analogue thinking
- How clarity, rigour, and buildability shape expressive architecture
- The craft of façade engineering and precision detailing