Archinect - News

Danish Architecture Center unveils new four-story slide by artist Carsten Höller

2020-06-15T14:48:00-04:00

With the reopening of Danish Architecture Center last week, Copenhagen welcomed a new art attraction: a 40-meter/130-foot-long tube slide spiraling down four stories inside DAC's boxy, OMA-designed BLOX home.

Photo: Kontraframe

Envisioned by German-Belgian artist Carsten Höller, famous for installing similar slides at art institutions around the world, the 15-meter/50-foot-tall DAC Slide is part of the Center's initiative to appeal to a broader audience and extend its range beyond the professional architecture community.

Photo: Kontraframe

"Why don’t we use slides in architecture as a supplement to stairs, elevators and escalators?" Carsten Höller commented on this latest piece. "They are fast, safe and energy-savvy — and they produce a sensation in the user that has been described as 'a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind, somewhere between delight and madness.'"

Photo: Kontraframe

Installing the enormous 4-ton slide took 21 days and required 13 slide sections, 94 pl...

"Bouncy-house urbanism is on the rise." – Christopher Hawthorne rides the U.S. Bank Tower's 'SkySlide'

2016-06-24T12:53:00-04:00

As white-shoe law firms shrink and expanding tech companies in L.A. increasingly move into restored warehouses or historic buildings, commercial skyscrapers around the country are struggling to find tenants. [...] That leaves the owners of aging all-office high-rises like the U.S. Bank Tower looking for ways to produce new revenue [...] OUE is not the first company to see a possible revenue stream in the desire of adults to pay money to act like children in downtown settings.

More on what's happening in Downtown Los Angeles:

"The most useless totem pole of mayoral hubris": Oliver Wainwright rides the ArcelorMittal Orbit

2016-06-23T18:06:00-04:00

Never has an attraction promised so much yet delivered so little. It was the roller coaster without a ride, the helter skelter without a slide, a £20m mountain of steel leering above London’s lean Olympic stadium as a mocking monument to the vanity of the city’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, and its funder, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal [...] As Guy de Maupassant said of the Eiffel Tower, being inside the Orbit is the best place to be – because it’s the only place you don’t have to look at it

Ouch.

Yet, it's not all bad: "...when you’re hurtling down through the structure’s contorted loops on the new corkscrew slide that opens this weekend, all this can be momentarily forgiven," opines Wainwright.

In related 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.

The West Coast's tallest tower is getting a glass-bottomed slide on its 69th floor

2016-03-01T20:37:00-05:00

Bank Tower owners OUE Limited announced today a new addition to the Skyspace observation deck tourist attraction that's guaranteed to give it that "thrill factor": a 36-foot long glass slide that will allow brave souls to slide from the 70th floor to the 69th along the outside of the building. Called the Skyslide, the chute will be made of clear glass four inches thick [and] sit about 1,000 feet above the ground

Don't look down.

Related on Archinect:

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:

'Skyhouse' outfits early NYC skyscraper with giant tubular slide and climbing column

2013-03-22T19:04:00-04:00

The Skyhouse, which occupies four stories of an early skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, shows architect David Hotson manipulating the available space to include features such as a climbing column and tubular metal slide with which inhabitants can move between levels. The living space rises through all four stories and can be accessed with the climbing pole — safety ropes included — while the huge German-constructed slide takes you down from the attic right to the entrance.

Carsten Höller Is Installing a Slide at New Museum

2011-10-07T12:28:13-04:00

If all goes as planned, the New Museum’s five-year-old building on the Bowery will become something of an amusement park beginning Oct. 26, with visitors hurtling through a giant plastic tube from the fourth floor to the second

The Slippery Slope at Tate Modern

2006-10-08T21:39:00-04:00

Making a piece that works in Tate Modern's vast turbine hall is far from child's play - Carsten Holler has responded to the challenge by turning the space into a giant playground. The artist tells Lynn Barber why riding his huge, curving, steel slides will change our perceptions and set us free. Observer, installation pics.