Junya Ishigami’s Balloon is a meditation on the relationship between space, scale and heft. A massive polyhedron seemingly lodged in a high volume atrium, almost filling up the whole space, yet the feeling is not of oppression and claustrophobia. The highly reflective surface of the polyhedron projects a distorted twin of the very space it fills into itself. The great shadow it casts on the ground is a reminder of its real physical existence. The polyhedron does not quite touch the sides of the atrium which bound the space, instead it floats precariously, suspended in the space, its whole 1 ton weight, as if caught in a moment of free fall, frozen, the instant before it hits the ground and shatters into shards of fractured reflections.
