Posted on behalf of Jo Baker

Ove Arup by Godfrey Argent, 1969.{credit}© National Portrait Gallery, London. Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, the V&A Engineering Season.{/credit}

He was the structural innovator behind Sydney Opera House, founded the world’s leading engineering consultancy, and pioneered the philosophy of “total design” — the equal partnership of engineers, architects and designers in construction. Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup (1895-1988) is now celebrated in this first retrospective of his work, Engineering the World, at London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, part of its Engineering Season.

On show are 150 never-before-exhibited sketches, technical drawings, architectural models, photographs, calculations and manifestos from a century of work by Arup and his colleagues at his eponymous consultancy, whose forerunner he set up in 1938. The compact show (funded by Arup) is squeezed into a room-sized cage of red steel beams copied from those of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which Arup co-designed with architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in the mid-1970s. The explanatory panels are worth scrutiny: they reveal Arup’s interest in science and early computing, his playful character and his enthusiasm for training the next generation of engineers.

Born in Newcastle, UK, Arup became interested in philosophy and engineering while at school in Denmark. He studied both disciplines at university in Copenhagen, graduating in 1922 with a specialism in reinforced concrete. Equally passionate about the arts, he was influenced by the Modernist movement — which promoted the idea that science and technology could improve society — and its luminaries, such as architects Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) and Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus group.

Penguin Pool, London Zoo, London, 1934.{credit}© ZSL. Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, the V&A Engineering Season.{/credit}

One of Arup’s early projects was the 1934 Penguin Pool at London Zoo. After studying penguin behaviour, he designed its thin gravity-defying spiral of interlocking ramps in concrete while working as a structural consultant for Berthold Lubetkin’s radical Tecton architectural partnership in London. The ramps’ curves were based on complex mathematics, and Arup’s calculations and notes are on display.

Sydney Opera House.{credit}© David Messent. Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design at the V&A Engineering Season.{/credit}

Arup had a strong sense of civic duty and designed air-raid shelters during the Second World War. His concepts were grand and controversial — massive concrete basements large enough to host hundreds of cars and people. (The government preferred small shelters.) Arup also worked on the Mulberry harbours, prefabricated temporary ports deployed during the 1944 Allied invasion in Normandy. He was responsible for a small but crucial element: a shock-absorbing fender that permitted the ships to dock. Photographs and technical drawings are on show.

Sydney Opera House is perhaps Arup’s most famous post-war project, and drawings and models of its design and construction form a focus of the exhibition. Faced with a freeform sketch of a collection of ‘sails’ by its Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, Arup pioneered the use of computers to solve the problem of how to build it from precast concrete. At the time most engineers still used slide rules and tables of logarithms. By renting a Ferranti Pegasus computer by the hour from the University of Southampton and writing their own software, Arup and his colleagues saved 10 years of manual calculations.

A doodle by Ove Arup.{credit}© Private collection.{/credit}

The exhibition includes a wooden conceptual model explaining the solution he eventually conceived in 1961: sections cut from a sphere. A 2-metre-long wooden replica of the opera house used in wind tunnel tests is on show, along with charts illustrating airflow around it. When Utzon dropped out midway through the project, Arup took the construction to completion in 1973.

Arup eventually turned from engineering to shaping a new generation of engineers. In the 1970s and 80s successors emerged, including Peter Rice, Ted Happold and Mike Glover, who worked with architects including Piano, Rogers and Norman Foster on projects such as the Menil Collection gallery in Houston. A tilting model of the gallery — known for its naturally lit spaces — reveals how sun and shadows fall on the building through the day and year.

Engineering the World concludes with a look at the company today. Arup’s philosophy is still shared by its 12,000 employees in more than 90 offices around the world. A glass panel full of bubbling green liquid turns out to be a living façade where algae in an aerated soup of nutrients generate heat and biofuel. A section of wooden wall is part of a ‘wikihouse’ – a collaborative unfolding design for a home.

Arup’s ashes were scattered over a footbridge he designed: Durham’s Kingsgate, opened in 1963 and one of his favourites. He built it by rotating two halves into place — fittingly, for one whose creativity linked engineering and design.

View of Kingsgate Bridge, Durham, 1963.{credit}Reproduced by permission of Durham University Library. Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design at the V&A Engineering Season. {/credit}

Jo Baker is senior Comment editor at Nature.

Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London, through 6 November. The V&A Engineering Season features displays, digital initiatives and a newly commissioned installation, Elytra Filament Pavilion, by experimental engineer Achim Menges with Moritz Dorstelmann, structural engineer Jan Knippers and climate-responsive engineer Thomas Auer. Inspired by filament structures of flying beetles’ forewing shells, the pavilion’s canopy is created from robotically fabricated carbon-fibre cells. Sensors in the canopy will capture anonymous data from the behaviour of visitors, allowing it to evolve.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson

László Moholy-Nagy, Dual Form with Chromium Rods, 1946 (Plexiglas and chrome-plated brass).{credit}Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 48.1149 © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation{/credit}

I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions.

The industrial designer, artist and photographer Lázló Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was certainly that. As the Guggenheim’s retrospective Moholy-Nagy: Future Present shows, the Hungarian pioneer of the Bauhaus and beyond worked in a dazzling array of media: film, photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design and typography. But behind the restless eclecticism, he adhered to the unifying theory (with the Constructivists) that art is integral to social transformation and must embrace new technologies. At a time of vast industrial expansion, he declaimed himself as “[n]ot against technological progress, but with it”, championing novel industrial materials — from Formica and aluminium to the Plexiglas in Dual Form with Chromium Rods (1946) in the rotunda. Drawn towards the airy, the transparent and the brilliantly coloured, he was also in love with light and movement: like contemporary Alexander Calder, he engineered moving parts and even electric motors into kinetic sculptures.

László Moholy-Nagy, A II (Construction A II), 1924 (oil and graphite on canvas).
{credit}Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection 43.900 © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York{/credit}

The exhibition takes a roughly chronological approach. Moholy-Nagy’s career began in earnest after he was injured in the First World War trenches. Much of the wall space is dedicated to earlier works such as the 1924 A II (Construction A II), an oil-and-graphite canvas in the Constructivist mode, that plays with colour intensity and transparency in rhombi and circles. Small abstract sculptures such as the welded, plated Nickel Sculpture with Spiral (1921) have a machined appearance. Its metal spiral inadvertently echoes the Guggenheim’s internal architecture, reflected on its glass case.

László Moholy-Nagy, Nickel Sculpture with Spiral, 1921 (nickel-plated iron, welded).
{credit}The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy 1956 © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation{/credit}

Deeper into the show we encounter Moholy-Nagy’s innovative photographic abstractions, which he called photograms. Developed directly on light-sensitive paper, these images (such as the 1926 Photogram) allowed the capture of objects in outline and even a playful profile of his own head. Other works reveal the artist’s intent to  harness the laws of physics. Space III (1940) is an abstract, multi-dimensional work composed of a Plexiglas sheet suspended in front of a white panel. The sheet is delicately etched and pigmented on both sides around an untouched circle, so that light both flows through and casts shadows on the panel. “Light does then what I could not do,” he wrote. “A sparkling, vibrating color effect through the addition of the shadows produce mixtures as no one could on the palette.”

Such materials and artistic approaches are ubiquitous now. But context and intention are critical to this show. There were moments when I felt as if I was in a history museum dedicated to the co-evolution of technology, industry and humanity. Clearly Moholy-Nagy was conscious of his place in time, and his role as interpreter of both past and present. He also sometimes felt he was speaking to the future. “I often had the feeling, when pasting my collages and painting my ‘abstract’ pictures, that I was throwing a message, sealed in a bottle, into the sea,” he wrote in 1944. “It might take decades for someone to find and read it.” Gradually I found myself seeing the avant-garde in the work by focusing on details and juxtaposition.

László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram, 1926 (gelatin silver photogram){credit}Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA{/credit}

The Room of the Present offers a full realization of the artists’ vision, meshing space, light and an industrial aesthetic. An exhibition space within an exhibition space, it was never built in his lifetime, but constructed in 2009 based on architectural drawings, some of which are on display. Images of dancers and race cars jostle with those of laboratories and industrial facilities. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent Battleship Potemkin is on view, but pride of place is given to a replica of Moholy-Nagy’s famous mixed-media kinetic sculpture Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1923-30). Attached to an electric motor and a simple gear box at the base, the collection of discs, springs and rods pivot, twirl and twist as the sculpture turns, casting colours and shadows onto the back of the box.

Moholy-Nagy left Nazi Germany in 1934, landing in Amsterdam, then London and eventually Chicago. There, in 1937, he founded the New Bauhaus, now known as the Institute of Design, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He called his institute a “laboratory for a new education”, where art, industry and intellectual curiosity could come together to solve human problems, large and small. “If the unity of art can be established with all the subject matters taught and exercised, then a real reconstruction of this world could be hoped for — more balanced and less dangerous,” he wrote at the height of the Second World War, in 1943. Thanks to a little luck, and immigration, he survived both wars and remained an optimist to the end, dying from leukaeumia in 1946.

László Moholy-Nagy, Room of the Present, constructed 2009 (mixed media), with Light Prop for an Electric Stage, 1930 (exhibition replica, 2006; metal, plastics, glass, paint, and wood, with electric motor).{credit}Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation{/credit}

Among the last pieces on display at the Guggenheim are Nuclear I (1945) and Nuclear II (1946). A response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the colourful globes in both paintings recall nuclear fireballs, frozen in a perpetual state of expansion. Inside are mosaic-like collections of abstract shapes, with faint hints of smoke and mushroom clouds.

 The bombings were a low point for the role of science in human affairs, but Moholy-Nagy interpreted the horror in his own way — with a chromatic intensity that speaks of hope amid destruction. In these and so many other works in this stunning exhibition, Moholy-Nagy’s belief in human resilience, as well as his sheer joy in experimenting with ideas, materials and light, shine through.

Jeff Tollefson is a reporter for Nature based in Washington DC. He tweets at @jefftollef. Moholy-Nagy: Future Present runs at the Guggenheim Museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue in New York through 27 September.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Black Widow, ca. 1948 (wire and painted metal), Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil, São Paulo.{credit}© 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London{/credit}

She hangs dark, immense and pocked with holes in a white room, a beast of many parts languidly revolving in the air. Part leaf, part lever, all magisterial grace, Black Widow is a quintessential Calder mobile — one of the signature inventions of the extraordinary twentieth-century artist-engineer.

This tremendous piece, three and a half metres long, is the finale to Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture at London’s Tate Modern, a show that maps the evolution of Calder’s thought and practice on a route that is itself like the slow turn of a mobile. I spiralled through rooms mesmerised by manifestations of the propulsive, experimental drive of the man. Calder was not just a pioneer of kinetic sculpture and one of the first to use industrial materials other than pigments, such as steel. His early wire sculptures are scribbles in metal, yet miraculously evoke heft through mere line. And his fascination with sound and performance led to probings of chance and uncertainty that influenced avant-garde US composers such as Earle Brown and John Cage.

Alexander Calder in his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, 1941.
{credit}Calder Foundation, New York / Art Resource, NY© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014{/credit}

Astrophysics also exerted a singular pull on the artist. Fired by the sight, from shipboard, of a serendipitous equilibrium — a setting Sun and rising Moon on opposite horizons — Calder would declare years later that the “underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe”, the “idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities”. Calder was to investigate such momentous problems of motion and relationship in mobiles both wind-driven and motorised, such as A Universe (1934), in which two spheres go through different 40-minute cycles. (Einstein reportedly watched them from start to finish while viewing the piece in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.)

As the Tate show makes clear, Calder’s own balancing act — one foot in science, one in art — arose from both chance and deliberation. Born into a family of artists and sculptors, he decided at 17 to study descriptive geometry and applied kinetics at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He then pursued painting at New York’s seminal Art Students League in the early 1920s and, after experimenting with metal sculpture, set off in 1926 for the cultural crucible of Paris.

Here he began to explore the suggestion of movement in the fluidity of works in wire such as Hercules and the Lion (1928). The star of this period, however, is the Cirque Calder, a troupe of miniature acrobats and animals sculpted in wire, wood, cork, fabric and other materials and used for live-action shows that enthralled the likes of Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. While the ingenious palette of materials may owe something to the Constructivism of Russian-born artist Naum Gabo, the wit and dogged study of the physics of moving objects are Calder’s own. A 45-minute film of him putting his performers through their paces, as fiercely concentrated as a four-year-old with a train set, is a major delight of this show.

Black Frame, 1934: one of Calder’s motorised sculptures. {credit}Calder Foundation, New York © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London{/credit}

And it’s one among many. We can, for instance, trace the gestation of Calder’s mobiles from his visit to Mondrian’s Paris studio in 1930, where he wondered why the Dutch painter didn’t set the cardboard rectangles he used to aid composition oscillating. Mondrian was dubious; Calder felt “like the baby being slapped to make its lungs start working”.

Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere 1932/33 (iron, wood, cord, thread, rod, paint, and impedimenta).{credit}Calder Foundation, Mary Calder Rower Bequest, 2011 © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London{/credit}

He began creating free-standing wire constructions hung with geometric forms in white, black and Mondrian-esque primaries, such as Small Feathers (1931). He played with mechanised motion in works like Black Frame (1934). And, distributing force through precise arrangements of levers and their fulcrums, he created suspended mobiles — suggesting orbiting planets, snowstorms, schools of fish, flotillas of cloud or, as some have noted, animated Mirós. He became an engineer of air, a definer of space.

Around the same time, Calder’s interest in the aural grew. The elements of his sculptures, he noted, were “weight, form, size, colour, motion and then you have noise”. Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/3) is an open-ended experiment in which two suspended coloured balls are arranged so that one hits a collection of bottles, a box, a can and a gong. Visitors would reorganise these to create randomised ‘compositions’.

Such investigations of ‘open form’ reached a new pitch in the 1940s. Calder fitted large mobiles such as Triple Gong (1948) with beaters and differently pitched brass gongs to create evocative music as they shifted in air, not unlike exquisitely calibrated windchimes. Later still, he collaborated with Earle Brown on Calder Piece, a “sonic animation” of Calder’s mobile Chef d’Orchestre, which by moving ‘conducts’ a percussion ensemble.

As the show reveals, Calder’s boldness in testing possibilities extended to other materials and contexts. Mercury Fountain, created for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris  is one; there were also theatrical sets, the Water Ballet, an ‘acoustical ceiling’ in Caracas — and more.

Triple Gong, ca. 1948 (brass, sheet metal, wire, paint).{credit}Calder Foundation, New York © 2015 Calder Foundation, New York / DACS, London{/credit}

Scientifically inspired art of the twentieth century might seem the usual seepage of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. Painters such as the Dadaist Max Ernst and muralist Diego Rivera were deeply influenced by developments in mathematics and particle physics, for instance. Sculptors, however, did not just depict; they embodied. Calder shaped the stuff of physics into a biomorphic aesthetic to rival Barbara Hepworth’s. And like Hepworth and her insistent use of voids in solid form, he found a way to marry the immateriality of air with a significant tonnage of standing and hanging metal.

This reassessment of an artist who created 22,000 works over an unstoppable career was a journey of discovery for me. As a child of thoroughly modernist artists, I early on absorbed (and loved) many of Calder’s works. But I found myself entranced, and educated, all over again — and seething with questions. I’d give a hell of a lot to know, for instance, what was going through Einstein’s mind as he gazed at Calder’s A Universe.

Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture runs at Tate Modern, London, through 3 April 2016. The quotes from Calder in this piece are from the show’s programme notes.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.