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Great. JUST what London needs, a giant squiggle. ArcelorMittal Orbit, Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s Olympic tower, is a gift to the tabloids. What’s a better physical representation of a waste of money and potential Olympic disorganisation than a giant Mr Messy?
Pointedly, it doesn’t have a point. This is not a phallic tower thrusting upwards, but, claims Nicholas Serota, one of its judges, something softer. Nor does it have a purpose. London’s Olympic site doesn’t need a physically or functionally pointless icon, of course. Like Olympics before, it’s already got plenty of, hopefully, useful icons, venues of inevitable spectacle designed for the world’s cameras, like Michael Hopkin’s Velodrome and Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic centre. Why do we need another vast, curling lattice of steel, 120m — just smaller than the London Eye — with no other purpose than to shout ‘coo-ey, look at me!’, for us to look at, and look from, swinging through its walkways and gawping at the views like punters on a rollercoaster?
But need isn’t the point. The pointless icon — the folly — is the architectural object of our age. Today, free-market money slops around the world, and globalised consumer culture renders every place the same, an international Esperanto of steel, glass and Starbucks. Places have to stand out. Every town from Nuneaton to Dubai these days needs to be “iconic”, filled with “landmarks” and “gateways” with the “wow factor” — or exactly what London mayor, Boris Johnson, called for in this design — “something to distinguish”. Architecture today has to perform like a celebrity in Heat magazine. And done well — like the London Eye — what’s wrong with a bit of fun?
But how good is this performance? Will ArcelorMittal Orbit be a white elephant, rotting in years to come, or will it be it, as Boris hopes, “an icon to match the Eiffel Tower”?
Kapoor and Balmond have a good track record, separately and together, of impressive architecture-meets-sculpture that makes the visitor viscerally, thrillingly aware of the space that surrounds them, like the bulging Marsyas (2002), in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. So, high hopes.
ArcelorMittal Orbit has echoes of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International, a spiralling homage to blissful life after the Russian revolution, and, especially, Constant Niewenhuy’s New Babylon — a utopian city of permanent entertainment for newly freed masses after a socialist revolution. They, though, had an ideological purpose. Is ArcelorMittal Orbit as revolutionary? Or just a giant advert for one of the world’s biggest multinationals, sweetened with a bit of fun?
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