mixed media ARChiteCtURe
A couple of weeks later we exchange emails about an
interview piece in The Guardian on the jazz saxophonist,
Ornette Coleman, whose so-called harmolodic compositions
explore relative pitch and abstruse chordal and melodic
progressions. Balmond’s talk of ‘infiltrations’ had reminded
me, sharply, of Song X, a 1985 album by Coleman and Pat
Metheny whose tonal and melodic complexity seemed
shocking at the time. ‘The idea is all there is,’ says Coleman at
the end of the article. ‘Trust me.’
And we can trust Balmond’s exposition at the Louisiana.
If the idea is all there is, any idea must simultaneously contain
and generate every possibility; and he has, indeed, created a
zone that keeps increasing, one that begins with the equivalent
of perfect pitch in what he has called the Rainbow Corridor,
which then gradually fragments into what seem rather like
jazz-modal explorations of space, structure and architecture
in the Flux and Networks spaces; the block-chords of classical
and Cartesian structural logic riven, and embellished.
The Rainbow Corridor and Flux segments are
brilliantly effective. Balmond gives us the beginnings of
geometry and proportion in relation to structure and
In Balmond’s mind, the identification and manipulations architecture, then ramifies them richly. Drifting past the
of points and lines, and the morphology of structure, are exhibits, plasma screens and his voiceovers in the Rainbow
implicitly on the edge of revelation and art. And they’re being Corridor, one passes through a series of overlapping gravities:
treated as artifice in his exhibition, Frontiers of Architecture, at images, intonations, explanations – a series of collages and
this extraordinary museum with its jump-cut volumes, fractured frontiers, at first straightforward, then of increasing
changes of level and surface, views of the sea, views of nothing, complexity: Robert Fludd’s divine monochord drawing
subtle shifts of light and texture. A flâneur’s dreamscape, this, of 1618… Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1529 painting The Battle of
a series of clefs in search of a roman or two. Alexander at Issus, illustrating multiple perspective… “in the
But now we’re in the boathouse of the Louisiana’s end, I get tiny dots, and this is called Cantor Dust… I am a dot.
director, at a large wooden table, surrounded by bricolages With dots I stretch into a line, and with a line I rule the world. I
of books. The bottle of Merlot has, so to speak, subdivided. have done so for years in the name of architecture… I confess
“I believe in the emergence of patterns,” says Balmond. to the joy of sliding, twisting and folding… somersaulting
“It’s a derogatory word in architecture, but it’s a word that into different disciplines and frames of reference”… Francis
can’t be trivialised. And I do believe in simultaneity. We can Bacon’s 1976 Portrait of Michael Leiris… shopping mall as
pick a path through it. Koestler was right: there’s always a fractal… Mandelbrot… Da Vinci’s liquid vortices.
reduction going on. It’s harder to admit richness.” The magic of the exhibition’s first two segments –
Up the slope, away from the water’s edge, the museum intellectual enquiry hazing into something like hallucination
staff are working deep into the night to get Balmond’s – solidifies into actuality in the final room, Networks. Here,
show ready for the preview. “It’s the multi-universe and the despite Balmond’s and the Louisiana’s best efforts, the
bubbly universe”, muses Balmond, “versus string theory and mysteries of his beloved ‘generative line’ become trapped,
vibrations.” He’s talking about the ideas of a friend, the and stilled, in familiar objects and images. The hazards of
eminent physicist Lee Smolin. “Lee talks about these things. informal creation become facts and our thoughts revert to
At about the fourth dimension, I get a bit lost. But Lee familiar patterns of observation, reference and conclusion.
shocked me. I asked him what space was about. He said it’s Balmond’s spatial mantras and mandalas have become yantras,
all about structure – a quantum loop. He’s talking about and our dalliance with his engrossing fusions of research and
discrete atoms of space with fractional dimensions!” delicate intuition has ended. But what a dalliance it is.
Emptiness as structure? “Intuition is something you can work
on,” Balmond says. “It’s a structure you can grow. It’s one of The Frontiers of Architecture I: Cecil Balmond is on show at
the structures of the universe. There’s a deep structure in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark,
the pattern of the stars.” until 21 October
Intuition, and ambition. “We’ve tried to do an exhibition
with all means, cinematic means”, he explains, “to realise the
possibilities to the fulfilment of the idea. This is where the
interesting part is. Architecture begins in crossover
phenomena. How do we get to a building? The very space
itself is making space. The frontier is right through this. It’s not
a line, it’s a zone that keeps increasing. We don’t know
anything about space. It makes itself.”
Above: Cecil Balmond. Courtesy ARUP
Artreview 98
Mixed Media_Architecture.indd 4 9/8/07 10:30:17
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