mixed media
MIXED MEDIA: ArchItEcturE
thE
InforMAlIst
Balmond at louisiana
words Jay Merrick
dusk on the restaurant patio of the Louisiana Museum of
Modern Art: the grassy knolls darkening, the priapic Miró bronze
losing its outline in the ferns above the gully where Chinese
performance artists had done their thing a week earlier. There’s
a soft amber bulge on the horizon, the radiance of Helsingborg
across the ashen waters of the Oresund strait dividing Denmark
from Sweden. “I want to show the vulnerability of architecture,”
says Cecil Balmond quietly. And then quizzically, after a pause:
“I do not have an answer.” Two hours later, at around midnight,
he will be less quizzical, marvelling at the fact that his geometrical
visions are implicated in new research concerning the structure
of malignant cells.
The first bottle of Merlot has been well breached. But
who, precisely, is Cecil Balmond? To describe him, one must
be imprecise. A Whitmanesque list of asymmetric cadence will
have to do: engineer emeritus, co-creator of Serpentine pavilions
and the unbuilt V&A Spiral, cohort of Rem and Toyo, Danny
and Anish, explainer of the ramifications of the number nine,
denizen of Club Class check-ins and the Northern Line, and,
in the 1970s, sweat-glazed regular at the fortified Shrine club in
Lagos, where Fela Kuti, afrobeat’s obeah man, got rhythmically
political on the capital’s corrupt ass.
Keats is in the mix, too: beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Balmond’s first brush with the potential beauty of geometry
, 2007, installation shot. Courtesy Louisana Museum
and number theory came during his time at Ibadan University.
Later, the Sri Lankan-born engineer-architect encountered an
aphorism of the legendary British mathematician G.H. Hardy
that remains seminal to him: ‘The most beautiful things have no
use, and then they do.’
But our increasing interest in relativity – irony, changes
of scale, ethical, spiritual and emotional sophistry, asymmetrical
warfare – have given obscure, and even apparently ugly things,
greater potential or virtue. As former deputy chairman of Arup,
perhaps the world’s most famous consultant engineers, Balmond
is an establishment figure. Yet his subtly recusant tendencies
have cloaked him in a certain celebrity: he has become known as
a brilliant decoder of the riddles of geometrical and proportional
The Frontiers of Architecture: Cecil Balmond chaos. The obscurest things have no use, and then they do. >
97 Artreview
Mixed Media_Architecture.indd 3 9/8/07 10:29:49
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