Engineering the World review – Ove Arup, the man who built modernity

Victoria & Albert Museum, London
He was the structural brain behind Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, and his empire now numbers 12,000 people. Three decades after his death, a new show celebrates the 20th century's most influential engineer

Tanks of algae burp and bubble in the entrance to the V&A's new exhibition, a shop window of eerie green gunge that gurgles away beneath a huge steel bracket the size of an aeroplane wing. The green slime might be the future of your double-glazing. It's a revolutionary new bio-reactive facade system, which uses glass sandwich panels of microalgae to generate heat and biomass from photosynthesis to heat buildings. The big bracket, meanwhile, is a model of a gerberette from the facade of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It's what allows all the guts of the building to hang there, mid-air, freeing up the gallery floors inside.

Designing is defining a sensible way of building