ArcelorMittal Orbit

According to London mayor Boris Johnson, in around October 2008 he and Tessa Jowell decided that the site in Stratford, London that was to become the Olympic Park for the 2012 Olympics needed "something extra" to "distinguish the East London skyline", and "arouse the curiosity and wonder of Londoners and visitors".[4]

A design competition held in 2009 called for designs for an "Olympic tower". It received about 50 submissions.[5] Johnson has said that his early concept for the project was something more modest than Orbit, along the lines of "a kind of 21st-century Trajan's Column", but this was dropped when more daring ideas were received.[4]

The media reported unconfirmed details of the project in October 2009, describing the interest of the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, one of Britain's richest men, in funding a project that would cost around £15 million. Boris Johnson was believed to want something like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.[6][7] At that time there were understood to be five artists being considered, including Antony Gormley.[6] Early designs reportedly included 'Transmission' by Paul Fryer, a 400-foot (120 m) high structure "resembling a cross between a pylon and a native American totem pole", according to The Times.[6] A spokesman for Johnson would only confirm that he was "keen to see stunning, ambitious, world-class art in the Olympic Park", and that work on commissioning the project was at an early stage.[6][7]

Mittal's involvement came about after a chance meeting with Johnson in a cloakroom in Davos in January 2009,[8] as they were on their way to separate dinner engagements. In a conversation that reportedly lasted 45 seconds Johnson pitched the idea to Mittal, who immediately agreed to supply the steel.[4] Mittal later said of his involvement, "I never expected that this was going to be such a huge project. I thought it was just the supply of some steel, a thousand tonnes or so, and that would be it. But then we started working with artists and I realised that the object was not just to supply steel but to complete the whole project. It took us almost 15 months of negotiation and discussion."[9] Johnson has said that, "In reality, ArcelorMittal has given much more than the steel."[4]

Kapoor's and Balmond's Orbit was announced as the winner on 31 March 2010.[10] According to The Guardian, Orbit was chosen from a short list of three, beating a design by Antony Gormley and one by the architectural firm Caruso St John.[11] According to The Times, Gormley's design was a 390-foot (120 m) steel colossus titled Olympian Man, a trademark piece of a statue of himself, rejected mainly on the grounds of its projected cost, estimated at £40 million.[12]

Johnson and Jowell agreed to issue a commission for Orbit in partnership with Mittal after it was chosen by a nine-person advisory panel brought together by them to advise on a long list of proposals.[4][10] According to Mittal, the panel made a unanimous decision to pick Orbit, as it both represented the Olympic Games and was achievable within the ambitious time frame.[5] Kapoor described it as "the commission of a lifetime".[10]

Johnson pre-empted possible criticism during the official launch by stating: "Of course some people will say we are nuts – in the depths of a recession – to be building Britain’s biggest ever piece of public art. But both Tessa Jowell and I are certain that this is the right thing for the Stratford site, in Games time and beyond."[4]

The completed structure was officially unveiled to the press and public on 11 May 2012.[13]

An image of the structure was included in the 2015 design of the British passport.[14][15]

The structure was re-purposed with the world's longest slide in 2016, as a way to attract more visitors.[16]

Construction in September 2011.

Orbit is located in the southern area of the Olympic Park, between London Stadium and the Aquatics Centre.[10] After the March 2010 confirmation of the winning design,[5][18] construction began in November 2010; it reached its full height in November 2011.[34]

Steel is the primary material used in the sculpture. According to Balmond, there was no feasible alternative, as steel was the only material that could give the minimum thickness and maximum strength represented in the coiling structure.[17] It was built from approximately 2000 tonnes of steel, produced as much as possible from ArcelorMittal plants, with the exact sourcing being determined by the grades of steel required and the technical requirements of the project.[5] Of this, 60% was recycled steel produced by the Esch Belval steel plant in Luxembourg.[35]

On 14 March 2011, with construction already underway on the main pylon, The One Show broadcast footage of the on-site status of project, and profiled the four-man team putting it together, comprising two steel erectors, a crane operator and a site foreman.

As an observation tower, Orbit has two indoor viewing platforms on two levels, with each level having capacity for 150 people.[18][31] According to the Greater London Authority, the observation platform offers "unparalleled views of the entire 250 acres (1.0 km²; 0.39 sq mi) of the Olympic Park and London's skyline".[10] According to The Independent, visitors should take the lift to the top and descend the 455-step staircase; this should allow them to appreciate the views around which Anish Kapoor arranged the sculpture.[31]

It is designed to cope with 700 visitors per hour.[18] During the Olympic Games the entrance fee was £15 for adults and £7 for children.[31] The tower does not include a dining area, however there is a cafe, shop and other facilities at the South Park Hub building, which opened in April 2014.

The ambition is that the sculpture, as well as being a focal point for the Olympic Park during the Games, will form part of the wider Stratford regeneration plans, which aim to turn the Olympic site into a permanent tourist destination after the Games.[4] Tessa Jowell said Orbit will be "like honey to bees for the millions of tourists that visit London each year".[10] Boris Johnson predicted it would become "the perfect iconic cultural legacy".[10] According to Lord Coe, chairman of the London 2012 Olympic organisers, it would play a central part in the Game's role of leaving a lasting legacy and transformed landscape in east London.[10]

During the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Paralympics, Joe Townsend (a Royal Marine and double amputee) delivered the Paralympic flame into Olympic Stadium via a zipline that was attached to the top of Orbit.[36]

Orbit in 2016 with The Slide added

In 2016, a permanent slide designed by German artist Carsten Höller was added to the sculpture. The slide is reported to be the world's tallest and longest tunnel slide at 178 metres.[37] Though it was originally reported that admission to the slide would cost around £5,[38] the general adult price for entry to the slide and viewing platforms is £30.00 (£25.00 if bought in advance), as of March 2023.[39]

At the time of its public launch, the total cost of Orbit was announced as £19.1 million.[10] ArcelorMittal was to fund up to £16 million, with the remaining £3.1 million being provided by the London Development Agency.[10] This consists of a £10 million cash donation, and £6 million in underwriting of capital costs, which could be potentially recovered from profits generated after the Games.[10] According to Johnson, the cost of the project would be recouped after the games through the private hire of a dining area at the top, predicting it would become a "corporate money-making venture".[18]

Mittal said he was immediately interested in Orbit after he remembered the excitement that surrounded the announcement that London had won the Olympic bid. He saw it as an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy for London, showcase the "unique qualities of steel" and play a role in the regeneration of Stratford.[5] Mittal said of his involvement in the project, "I live in London – I’ve lived here since 1997 – and I think it’s a wonderful city. This project is an incredible opportunity to build something really spectacular for London, for the Olympic Games and something that will play a lasting role in the legacy of the Games."[5]

Advisory panel member and director of the Tate gallery, Nicholas Serota, said Orbit was "the perfect answer to the question of how sport and art come together", and praised Mittal's "really impressive piece of patronage" for supporting a "great commission".[21]

In October 2015 Len Duvall, a Labour member of the London Assembly, stated that the tower was losing £520,000 a year; LLDC said they had revised their visitor target from 350,000 to 150,000 per year.[40]

Overall reception to Orbit was mixed, but mostly negative. With regard to its potential as a lasting visitor attraction, The Guardian's Mark Brown reflected on the mixed fortunes of other large symbolic London visitor attractions such as the popular, but loss-making, Thames Tunnel; the Skylon structure, dismantled on the orders of Winston Churchill; and the successful London Eye.[11] When plans were first reported for an Olympic tower, the media pointed to a manifesto pledge of Johnson's to crack down on tall buildings, in order to preserve London's "precious" skyline.[6][7] The Times criticised the idea as a vanity project of Johnson's, with a design "matching his bravado", built to "seal his legacy", surmising it would be compared to other similar vanity projects such as the "wedding cake", the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II built in Rome, or the Neutrality Arch, a rotating golden statue erected by Turkmenistan's President Saparmurat Niyazov, while comparing Johnson to Ozymandias.[6] Art critic Brian Sewell said "Our country is littered with public art of absolutely no merit. We are entering a new period of fascist gigantism. These are monuments to egos and you couldn't find a more monumental ego than Boris."[6][7]

The Times reported the description of it being the "Godzilla of public art".[12] In October 2012, ArcelorMittal Orbit was nominated and made the Building Design magazine shortlist for the Carbuncle Cup—an award for the worst British building completed in the past year, which was ultimately awarded to the Cutty Sark renovation.[41][42]

Jay Merrick of The Independent said that "[Orbit's] sculptural power lies in its ability to suggest an unfinished form in the process of becoming something else", describing how its artistic riskiness elevated it above the banal artworks of the public art movement that have been built elsewhere in Britain's towns and cities. Merrick was of the opinion that it would be either loved or hated, being a design which is "beautifully fractious, and not quite knowable".[28] Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian described Orbit as "Olympian in ambition" and a "fusion between striking art and daring engineering", and said that, the Aquatics Centre apart, it represented the architecturally striking Joker in the pack, given that the rest of the landscaping and architecture for the Games "promises little to get excited about". He believed it would become a "genuine eyecatcher" for the Olympics television coverage, with its extraordinary form being a "strange and enticing marriage of sorts" between the Eiffel Tower and the un-built early Soviet era Tatlin's Tower, with the biblical Tower of Babel as "best man".[19]

Richard Morrison of The Times described Orbit as "like an enormous wire-mesh fence that has got hopelessly snagged round the bell of a giant french horn", adding that it "seems like an awful lot of trouble just to look at East London", in comparison to a music hall comedian's refrain at the $16 million cost of the Brooklyn Bridge.[33] Morrison not only compared Johnson to Ozymandias, but also to the 20th century dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu, in their acts of "phallic politics" in building grandiose monuments.[33] Criticising the lack of public involvement, he described how it would be an "undesired intrusion by the few into the consciousness of the many".[33] He feared that it could become one of the many "thousands of naff eyesores" of recent public art in Britain, citing the embracing couple at St Pancras station (The Meeting Place), the Dockland's Traffic Light tree, and the proposed Rotherhithe Tunnel 'match-stick man' tribute to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as London-based examples.[33] Fellow Times writer Tom Dyckhoff, while calling it "a gift to the tabloids" and a "giant Mr. Messy", questioned whether the Olympic site needed another pointless icon, postulating whether it would stand the test of time like the London Eye and become a true icon to match the Eiffel Tower, or a hopeless white elephant. Suggesting the project had echoes of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, and especially Constant Nieuwenhuys' utopian city New Babylon, he asked whether Orbit was just as revolutionary or possessed the same ideological purpose, or whether it was merely "a giant advert for one of the world’s biggest multinationals, sweetened with a bit of fun".[27]

Rowan Moore of The Guardian questioned if it was going to be anything more than a folly, or whether it would be as eloquent as the Statue of Liberty.[43] He speculated that the project might mark the time when society stops using large iconic projects as a tool for lifting areas out of deprivation. He questioned its ability to draw people's attention to Stratford after the Games, in a similar manner to the successes of the Angel of the North or the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.[43] He also questioned the piece's ability to strike a chord like the Angel, which he believed had at least "created a feelgood factor and sense of pride" in Gateshead, or whether it would simply become one of the "many more unloved rotting wrecks that no one has the nerve to demolish". He postulated that the addition of stairs and a lift made Orbit less succinct than Kapoor's previous successful works, while ultimately he said "hard to see what the big idea is, beyond the idea of making something big".[43]

Fellow Guardian writer John Graham-Cumming rejected comparisons to icons like the Eiffel Tower, which had itself not been intended to be a lasting monument, only persisting into public acceptance as art through being useful; he also pointed out the Colossus of Rhodes collapsed within a few decades, and the Tower of Babel was "constructed to glorify those that constructed it." He suggested that Johnson should reconsider whether it should be pulled down after 20 years. Questioning its corporate role, he believed that meant it looked less and less like a work of art and more like a vanity project.[32] In an online poll published by The Guardian, 38.6% of readers considered it a "grand design", while 61.4% considered it "garbage".[44]

Responding to concerns from The Times that ArcelorMittal's sponsorship and naming of Orbit would represent an improper incursion of corporate branding into public life, Johnson stated that Olympic rules mean that it cannot carry any corporate branding during the games.[8] Felicity Carus of The Guardian's environment blog questioned whether ArcelorMittal's record on carbon emissions was good enough to mean Orbit represented a fitting monument for the 2012 Olympics, billed as a 'world's first sustainable Olympics'.[45]

The Mittal Steel company purchased the Omarska mining complex and planned to resume extraction of iron ore from the site.[46] Mittal Steel announced in Banja Luka on 1 December 2005 that the company would build and finance a memorial in the 'White House' but the project was later abandoned. Many Bosnian Serbs believe there should not be a memorial, while many Bosniaks believe that construction should be postponed until all the victims are found and only if the entire mine—which is in use—be allocated for the memorial site.[47]

By the time of the 20th anniversary of the camp's closure proposals for a physical memorial to the camp's existence had made no progress. ArcelorMittal said that it was prepared to meet the former inmates' demands but the local authorities were ultimately responsible for granting permission. The Republika Srpska authorities considered that allowing camp survivors free access to the site and the construction of a memorial as originally agreed by ArcelorMittal would undermine reconciliation. "Prijedor 92" president Mirsad Duratović, stated that the campaign for a memorial would continue.[48]

In July 2012, ahead of the start of the 2012 London Olympic Games, survivors of the camp laid claim to the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower, located in the Olympic Park beside the Olympic stadium, as the 'Omarska Memorial in Exile'. The survivors allege that the Orbit is "tragically intertwined with the history of war crimes in Bosnia, as the bones of victims are mixed in with the iron ore". ArcelorMittal denied that material from Omarska had been used in the Orbit's construction. The company said that sensitive issues relating to the mine could not be addressed by ArcelorMittal on its own. Campaigners urged ArcelorMittal as the world's largest steel producer to use its considerable influence to oppose the local politics of denial and play an active role in healing fractured communities that have made the company's success possible. Susan Schuppli of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths' College in London, observed that ArcelorMittal insistence on "not taking sides" in an area where persecution and injustice continued was not neutrality but taking a political position by default.[49]

The Aquatics Centre (left), ArcelorMittal Orbit (centre), London Stadium (background, right) and Water Polo Arena (foreground, right) in the London Olympic Park viewed from the Westfield Stratford City in May 2012

The advisory panel consisted of:[10]

• Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery
• Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Gallery
• Hans-Ulrich Obrist, also of the Serpentine Gallery
• Sarah Weir OBE, of the Olympic Delivery Authority
• Stuart Lipton, of Chelsfield LLP
• Anita Zabludowicz, of the 176 gallery Zabludowicz collection
• Michael Morris and James Lingwood, directors of the Artangel arts commissioning organisation
• Munira Mirza, the Mayoral Advisor on Arts and Culture

In announcing the winning design, Johnson thanked the Greater London Authority, the Olympic Delivery Authority and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, as well as David McAlpine and Philip Dilley of Arup, and Sir Robin Wales and Jules Pipe for their involvement and support in the project.[4]

• B of the Bang, the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games sculpture
• Skylon, the London 1951 Festival of Britain tower
• The White Horse at Ebbsfleet, a proposed giant sculpture for Kent
• Googie architecture, earlier space-inspired architecture
• Unisphere, constructed by competitor United States Steel for the 1964 New York World's Fair

• "ArcelorMittal Orbit" (PDF). london.gov.uk > Art & Culture > London 2012 > The ArcelorMittal Orbit > Download a detailed overview. Mayor of London. n.d. p. 15. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 13 April 2010.
• "London 2012: Anish Kapoor Orbit tower takes shape". BBC News. 25 February 2011.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to ArcelorMittal Orbit.

• Official website
• Orbit Anish Kapoor website
• The ArcelorMittal Orbit Greater London Authority
• 360 degree view of the Orbit London Mayor's YouTube channel