Exhibitions about architecture are difficult, exhibitions about engineering more so. That's because no display can convey what its authors have most at heart, or even a direct representation of it, as drawings, models, and photographs can for what an architect does. Engineering is all about process. It can certainly have style, but that style is about means to an end—something not essentially visual.
These thoughts are prompted by the Victoria and Albert Museum's show about Ove Arup, by common reckoning the most remarkable of British twentieth-century engineers. For any biographer, let alone exhibition organizer, Arup presents a challenge. Personally, he was the reverse of all the clichés about engineers. He was not a specially great designer. Nor was he thrusting and masculine like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson, or John A. Roebling, indeed he could be bumbling, diffident, self-effacing, sometimes comic even. Yet he had undoubted charisma, of that invaluable...
University of California Press