032C Issue 14 - "Cecil Balmond" Berlin Winter 2007/08

Wolfgang Tillmans on the man who celebrates complexity: Cecil Balmond. China 2008 according to Sarah Morris, The future of Print Spring/Summer 2008. “Complexity is irreducible—it is not reductionist. And this is the conviction I have and it has grown in all my work—you embrace it full on,” states structural engineer CECIL BALMOND in our 40-page cover story on him and the engineering firm he heads, ARUP, photographed by WOLFGANG TILLMANS. Cecil Balmond is a structural engineer, author, and man of ideas; he is deputy chairman at the global design and engineering firm ARUP, and director of its think-tank, the Advanced Geometry Unit. Architects Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Toyo Ito, among others, are indebted to his groundbreaking structural work. Both Balmond and Tillmans have dismantled the very architecture of their genres—Balmond’s genre being architecture itself, and Tillmans’s being the representational genres of portraiture and still life. A dismantling pictured and reformulated in an image essay, in which Tillmans distills an early 21st-century office life so liberated by innovation that it is uninhibited by its cubicles. Contributors David Armstrong, Jens Balzer, Jodie Barnes, Christopher Bollen, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Carson Chan, Tabassom Charaf, Clang, Todd Cole, Nick Currie, Roger Deckker, Aram Dikiciyan, Todd Eberle, Patrik Ervell, Estelle Hanania, Ingeborg Harms, Alex Hawgood, Oliver Helbig, Christian Jankowski, Cynthia Leung, Pierre-Alexandre de Looz, Niklas Maak, Alex Needham, Hans Ulrich Obrist.