I know this is April Fool's Day, yet the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the striking asymmetric red tower you see here, is indeed the Joker in the Olympian pack. I mean that favourably. With the exception of Zaha Hadid's watered-down aquatics centre, the architecture and landscaping of the 2012 Olympics promises little to get excited about.
Now, like an unexpected Joker popping up in a politely arranged hand of cards, Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond's 115m Orbit raises the Olympic design stakes provocatively skywards. What an extraordinary thing this is: a strange and enticing marriage of sorts between the Eiffel Tower and Tatlin's Tower (an unbuilt Soviet Russian monument designed in 1920 that would have dwarfed Eiffel's), with the Tower of Babel as best man. The AM Orbit promises to be a genuine eyecatcher, the focus of TV camera crews at Stratford during the 2012 Games.
For Kapoor and Balmond, this fusion between striking art and daring engineering, is meant to represent the energy of the Games themselves. And, just as the way humans run is a triumph of dynamic motion over inherent instability, so the tower rises in a continuous unfolding and overlapping of "unstable", non-linear or eccentric orbits. But, don't worry; the steel tower will be quite stable.
Its design is that of a giant lattice tripod sporting a counterweight collar around its neck designed to offset the weight of its head, a two-storey dining and viewing gallery. Or, as Balmond explains: "Imagine the tower as a pattern cut out from a giant steel cone; you get stability and a filigree quality at one and the same time." Kapoor and Balmond have described the tower as an enormous "steel knot", the unravelling of a sensationally long strand of steel, or as the biggest ever "treble clef."
Whatever you make of its shape, it will certainly be fun to sprint up and down its 500 winding stairs, or ride up it serenely in a steel lattice lift. Kapoor and Balmond enjoy an established track record working on giant and defiantly different public artworks. This decidedly different tower, Olympian in ambition, should continue to delight us long after the Olympics have been forgotten.