didn’t have the money that the Chinese had for Beijing,” said Ian Louden, head of brand worldwide for ArcelorMittal. The materials were procured from every continent in which ArcelorMittal operates and were assembled in a factory near Manchester. Nearly 60 percent of the more than 2,000 tons of steel used to make the Orbit came from recycled scrap. Mittal contributed £19.6 million pounds (or $31.4 million), almost the entire budget of the project, to have the sculpture named after his company.
Mittal, needed a private donation to build its largest public art project in decades. Constrained by Britain’s deep recession, the city, Mr. Mittal the idea of building something to add artistic panache to the Olympic Park. Mittal, the chief executive of the huge steel maker ArcelorMittal and one of the world’s richest men, at the coat check room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Orbit project got its start in 2009 after Mr. Government officials have since said that that figure has risen by an estimated 20 percent to £11 billion ($17.2 billion), driven largely by the cost of security. Cameron’s statements that the Olympic Games would be well worth the £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion) cost to taxpayers, according to ComRes, a polling company. The project has also brought out Londoners’ complicated feelings about public art, several people involved in the project said.īut 51 percent of British residents surveyed in March said they disagreed with Mr. One of the most visible additions to the London skyline in decades and its tallest sculptural tower (about 70 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty), the Orbit has drawn criticism not just for its avant-garde design, but as a symbol - in spite of its mostly private financing - of the billions in government money being spent on the Olympics at a time when Britons are struggling under austerity measures put in place by the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron. “The most lasting legacy of the multimillion-pound circus about to roll into town will be a big red clot on the landscape,” the columnist Catherine Cain wrote of the Orbit in The Watford Observer, the newspaper of a town near London. And, at least for now, the sculpture is also serving as a prime target for British Olympic crankiness. They’ve called the Orbit, designed by the Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor and the Sri Lankan architect Cecil Balmond, the “Eye-full Tower” and “Helter-Skelter,” and have compared it to a “contorted mass of entrails.” Envisioned as a symbol of London looming over the site of this summer’s Olympic Games, the Orbit, which visitors will enter, ascend and explore, is designed as an attraction to rival the London Eye and Big Ben for decades to come. Many Londoners don’t see it quite that way. LONDON - Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has said that the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a spiraling goliath of red tangled steel that stands 35 stories above the city’s Olympic Park, would have “dwarfed” the aspirations of Gustave Eiffel and “boggled the minds” of the ancient Romans.
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