Architecture divides again at the Olympic Park

With news last week that Boris Johnson had announced Anish Kapoor’s winning design for a visitor attraction, opinion was immediately divided!

Olympic Tower - courtesy Arup

The steel structure is to form a centrepiece of the 2012 Olympic Park, is to be named ‘The ArcelorMittal Orbit’. It will become the UK’s largest sculpture at 115m in height (22m higher than the Statue of Liberty). It is estimated to cost £19.1m – funded by the steel company AreclorMittal after its CEO Lakshmi Mittal was approached by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. It is said to offer unparalleled views of the entire 250 acres of the Olympic Park and London’s skyline from a special viewing platform.

Peter Hitchens in his usual diatribe in the Mail on Sunday suggests, “Only a nation on the way down, whose culture was dominated by phonies and jokers, could allow the building of the stupid and ugly tower planned to adorn London’s Olympic Park.”. This is the man who denies that Dyslexia exists.

I think the tower looks amazing!

I also think that there is a clever attraction here. When we looked at world class attractions in the USA with the Sheriff of Nottingham, one of the the features we found was ‘views’. These were obvious at Top of the Rocks in New York and The Space Needle in Seattle. But there were subtle views too – like the live viewing ‘theatre’ at The High Line in New York. We seem to be attracted at looking at our fellow humans from above!

Nottingham has a great opportunity to do this with the Castle. In the short term we keep bringing back the big wheel – offering great views. Imagine having a structure like this – it would be brilliant. We do have some of Anish Kapoors work at The Playhouse…

When the Eiffel Tower was built it was the subject of much criticism – especially from the artistic and literary elite, some saying,

“We protest with all our force, with all our indignation, in the name of unappreciated French taste, in the name of menaced French art and history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower… Is Paris going to be associated with the grotesque, mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines? ”

A sense of deja vu? And the Luddites still roam the earth freely….