In conversations with the architecture critic Sanford Kwinter, Cecil Balmond reveals his vision and multifaceted talents in a retrospective exhibition of his accomplishments at the Graham Foundation Gallery in Chicago. “The impossible made possible. This is how I regard Cecil’s influence on contemporary architecture. Through his commitment to experimentation and belief in structure as a creative act he has helped realize some of the most thrilling buildings of the last thirty years,” said Sarah Herda, curator of the exhibition. According to Cecil Balmond, “Architecture is the experience of form within shape-the rhythm and patterns that organize creativity. Everything we do is underlined by a rigor even if it appears informal; and, not unlike music, it is given a life, a beat with the rhythms created by not only patterns but folds and branches that we study. These are solids that explore the void from zero to infinity.” Since the early 1980s Balmond has collaborated with such important contemporary architects and artists working today as Toyo Ito, Anish Kapoor, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Alvaro Siza. Balmond has introduced innovative structural concepts that have resulted in some of the most challenging buildings in the canon of contemporary architecture. His long standing collaboration with Rem Koolhaas has yielded an array of groundbreaking projects such as the Maison a Bordeaux (1998), the Seattle Central Library (2004), Casa da Musica (2005) in Porto, and the new CCTV tower in Beijing (2009). Cecid Balmond has transformed the role of the engineer in contemporary architecture with his unorthodox and visionary approach that merges architecture and engineering. Born in Sri Lanka and trained as a civil engineer, Balmond is the deputy chairman of ARUP, which he joined in 1968. He founded the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) in 2000, a research based practice, which is comprised of architects, artists, engineers, and scientists, to pursue his interest in the genesis of form using numbers, music, and mathematics as vital sources. Under Balmond’s direction, the AGU works to develop new typologies for known building programs, as seen in the Coimbra Footbridge, Mondego River, Portugal (2006), the office building Twist, London (2004), the Battersea Power Station Master Plan, London (1999-2007) and the Ranchi Cricket Stadium in India (2008). A documentation of a unique thinker and practitioner at the height of his career.