Archinect - News

"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.

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.