"Cecil Balmond is seen as being almost divine in Japan," says Shino Nomura, the curator of the latest exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
Titled "Element: Cecil Balmond," the show is a dive into the mind and work of perhaps the most celebrated structural engineer alive. Though not quite a household name, Balmond, a Sri Lankan-born and London-based director of storied engineering consultancy ARUP, is revered among architects and engineers not only for his virtuoso collaborations with pioneering architects on iconic buildings but also for his revolutionary, almost spiritual understanding of structure and space as emerging from latent generative principles hidden in the forms of nature. Part science, part art and part philosophy, his thought evades easy categorization, weaving its own connections to produce mesmerizing creations.
At the core of this show is an exploration of the relations between the forms created by nature and forms created by man. The "element" of the title refers to these two fundamental realms of existence. In Balmond's words, there is "the element of nature, out there; and the element that is within us, our artificiality." These two realms are allocated to the two main halls of the gallery.