What do Rem Koolhas, Shigero Ban and Daniel Libeskind have in common, apart from the obvious? They all owe a substantial debt to the engineer Cecil Balmond for some of their greatest works. Indeed, Rem Koolhas credits Mr Balmond with 'entirely changing my outlook on structure, thereby enabling me to rethink architecture.'
It's been a long time coming, but finally an exhibition, 'The Boundaries of Architecture I - Cecil Balmond', which celebrates the unsung hero of contemporary architecture's ideas, methods and sources of inspiration, opens on 15 June at Louisiana, the Danish Museum of Modern Art.
A pioneering engineer in his manner of boundary-breaking thinking, Balmond believes his work to be a 'totally creative activity' that can draw on all sorts of sources for inspiration from music to mathematics and much in between. His, at times, unconventional method of structural geometry is the key to the seemingly limitless inspiration he provides to some of today's most celebrated architects.
The exhibition is the first of four showing at Louisiana over the next few years. Each will explore the new possibilities in architecture, borne out of advancing technology, with Balmond's focusing on the relationship between science and architecture of which engineering is the meeting point.