Archinect - News

Carsten Höller to unveil his ArcelorMittal Orbit slide in June

2016-04-27T17:49:00-04:00

Höller wanted to show that you don’t necessarily get to know a sculpture better by literally travelling through it; that once inside it begins to look like something else entirely... The Slide, a permanent fixture at London’s Olympic Park, will give people a full 40 seconds to experience this and decide for themselves as they make their way down the 178m chute at an estimated 15mph.

Artist Carsten Höller to wrap world's longest tunnel slide around the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower in London

2015-08-03T15:03:00-04:00

This week, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London announced that “the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide” will wrap around Anish Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” When the sculpture went up in 2009 after winning a design challenge, it proceeded to receive mostly scathing reviews — and a spot on the shortlist of the 2012 Carbuncle Cup [...]. Today, Kapoor revealed that the slide is actually a work of art, designed by none other than Carsten Höller at Kapoor’s own invitation.

In other artsy-slide-related news on Archinect:

BBC on the ArcelorMittal Orbit

2012-06-14T19:03:00-04:00

In this one-off special the Culture Show goes behind-the-scenes to follow it from commission to completion, and discovers just how difficult it is to build a tower for the 21st century.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower

2011-12-13T19:58:00-05:00

The name of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower is a real mouthful, a hybrid title for a mongrel artwork. The contorted steel “sculpture-cum-tower-cum-engineering feat,” in the inelegant phrase of Tate director Nicholas Serota, is the totem of our Olympic games, rising more than 375 feet out of the central plaza of the park, on former light industrial land equidistant between Stratford and Hackney Wick in east London.

London's Biggest Erection

2010-03-31T19:52:00-04:00

A 120 metres tall looping tower structure proposed for London is designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond. It will officially be called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, after steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Europe, who is funding it. In a most curious statement, Mayor of London Boris Johnson said that if he and Mittal had not bumped into each other in a Davos cloakroom - read bathroom - "we would not be where we are today".
A 120 metres tall looping tower structure proposed for London is designed by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond. It will officially be called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, after steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Europe, who is funding it. In a most curious statement, Mayor of London Boris Johnson said that if he and Mittal had not bumped into each other in a Davos cloakroom - read bathroom - "we would not be where we are today". guardian | related; Japan's Biggest Erection