Jump to content

ArcelorMittal Orbit

Sachinism

By Sachinism
in Chit Chat

 Share

Recommended Posts

Sachinism Newbie

Sachinism

Posted
Posted

A spiralling sculpture designed by Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor has been chosen as the monument to mark the London 2012 Olympic Games. The 115m tall piece, named the ArcelorMittal Orbit, will be placed in the Olympic Park and will be 22m higher than New York's Statue of Liberty. The £19.1m design incorporates the five Olympic rings and will offer visitors panoramic views of London. London Mayor Boris Johnson revealed plans for the tower on Wednesday. "I am deeply honoured to be invited to undertake this challenging commission," Kapoor said. "I am particularly attracted to it because of the opportunity to involve members of the public in a particularly close and personal way. It is the commission of a lifetime." The artist will work with leading structural designer, Cecil Balmond of engineering firm Arup. Organisers said Balmond had worked on "some of the greatest contemporary buildings in the world", including the CCTV building in Beijing, as well as numerous Serpentine Gallery pavilion commissions. ''Long after the Games are over, our aim is to have a stunning spectacle in east London that will be recognised around the world," Mr Johnson said. "Anish Kapoor's inspired art work will truly encapsulate the energy and spirit of London during the Games and, as such, will become the perfect iconic cultural legacy." Steel company ArcelorMittal - owned by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal - will fund up to £16m of the project with £3.1m provided by the London Development Agency. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8597069.stm orbit_artistsimpression_1.jpgorbit_borisandtessa.jpg Looks like a mess :/

Clarke Mentor

Clarke

Posted
Posted

Gross! Just go ahead with the Bukhimgham Palace/Canary Wharf/London Bridge and admit that there's no imagination over there these days :winky: On second thoughts, wasnt the architect of Milau Viaduct a Brit ?

Gunner_Mania Newbie

Gunner_Mania

Posted
Posted
"Anish Kapoor's inspired art work will truly encapsulate the energy and spirit of London during the Games and, as such, will become the perfect iconic cultural legacy."
Kuch bhi..I can never understand when people make statements like this. A few nice sounding words - encapsulate, energy spirit, iconic cultural legacy - put them together in a sentence and make yourself sound as if you said something very important, but something that doesn't mean anything or is understood by mos t people listening or reading it.
yoda Newbie

yoda

Posted
Posted
looks like someone vented his frustrations on a wire rope
Looks like a broken roller coaster.
The TOI calls it the Eiffel Tower in a drunken state :haha:
:hysterical: Now this is called baffle with BS. :giggle:
Sooda Mentor

Sooda

Posted
Posted

Very interesting write up this...have a read... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/03/london-olympic-tower-ian-jack The official name for London's Olympic tower – there are already several unofficial ones – is the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Boris Johnson had some fun fumbling with the name when he unveiled Anish Kapoor's design this week, but let's try to deconstruct it; it may tell us something about the world's modern history. Arcelor first. The first two letters come from Arbed, a Luxembourg steel company (Acieries Reunies Burbach-Esch-Dudelange) formed in 1911 from three smaller companies with origins in the late 19th century. The next three letters, c, e and l, are taken from Aceralia, a Spanish steel company which grew out of another early 20th-century amalgamation, this time of three blast furnace businesses in Bilbao. A hundred years ago it was Spain's biggest company; its later career is complicated by many takeovers and reorganisations and its acronym less easily explained than Arbed's, but by the year 2000 it was its country's leading steelmaker. The 'or' is from Usinor, the French steelmaker formed in 1948 by a merger of two old companies (the important one, acronym-wise, is Les Forges et Aciéries du Nord et de l'Est). In 2001, Arbed, Aceralia and Usinor came together to form the pan-European Arcelor. In the old days, given some imagination, it had been possible to see a place and a factory behind a company title – a drift of furnace smoke, say, over Dudelage in Luxembourg or heaps of iron ore near Bilbao – but now the association between an industry and the place it inhabited became almost invisible. As to Mittal, the basic facts are well known. Lakshmi Mittal is the richest man in Europe and the fourth or fifth richest in the world, with personal wealth estimated at more than £19bn. After Mittal Steel bought out most of Arcelor's shareholders in 2006, he became chairman and chief executive of the world's biggest steel company. ArcelorMittal has 250,000 workers at plants in 60 countries that together produce 8% of global steel output and last year earned revenues of around £44bn. Mittal is an Indian citizen whose company makes no steel in Britain and is registered in the Dutch Antilles, but he chooses to live in London. But the name Mittal, where does it come from? Many people in India, particularly those devoted to the tradition of arranging marriages inside a caste grouping, would have an answer. The Mittals are a gotra – a subdivision – of the Agarwals. And who are the Agarwals? Originally they were a trading caste, strongly represented in the villages and rural towns of northern Rajasthan. In 1950 Lakshmi Mittal was born in such a place – at Sadulpur, a railway junction in Churu district, in a house that by some accounts was lit by oil lamps and drew its water from a well. At first glance, the story of his rise seems almost impossible; like a story from the Victorian canon of self-help, in which the Scottish handloom weaver's son Andrew Carnegie crosses the Atlantic to become America's foremost steel magnate. In Mittal's case, the facts are subtler. He didn't leave on a train from Sadulpur Junction for an uncertain destination with nothing more than hope in his heart. His father had a steel business in Kolkata, and it was in that city that Mittal learned the trade and studied for his commerce degree. As the former capital of India, Kolkata had been attracting trading families such as the Mittals for at least a century. They became known as Marwaris – confusingly, because most of them came, like the Mittals, from a part of Rajasthan well to the north of Marwar. A mythology grew up, some of which may be true. It was said that Marwar meant "region of death" and that the unpromising nature of the land, mainly arid desert, had forced Marwaris into livelihoods made from wheeling and dealing. Traders who built up enough capital became moneylenders (Mrs Lakshmi Mittal is a moneylender's daughter), extending what would now be called leverage to farmers and merchants. In a country where bank credit was hard to find, the Marwaris' astute lending made them vital to the commercial progress of British India. By independence, several had become prominent industrialists. Little of this success guaranteed them popularity. In Kolkata, Marwaris were (and sometimes still are) seen as money-minded outsiders who hold to strictly vegetarian diets and a conservative view of women. On the other hand – and "Say what you like about the Marwaris, but …" is a favourite opening in Kolkata households – their philanthropy is well known and respected. Temples, schools, colleges, planetariums, hospitals: all have been financed by Marwari money, just as it was a Marwari who funded Gandhi and the movement that ended the Raj. This was GD Birla. He was Gandhi's friend – Gandhi was assassinated in the garden of his Delhi house – and it was when he was on some Gandhian business in London that I met him in 1978. Our encounter led to an unfamiliar but rewarding experience, that of being "taken up" by the elderly leader of the then richest industrial dynasty in India. "I want to show you India," GD said, and later he did, though what he meant by India was Birla India: the Birla car factory, the Birla lino factory, the Birla newspaper, the Birla cotton mill, and not least the Birla University he'd established at his birthplace, Pilani, which isn't far from where Mittal was born. Never again will I duck my head so often to receive so many marigold garlands, or take a salute from a podium as a great man's friend. One day at lunch he recalled a prewar experience in London, where he'd gone to talk to senior figures in the Labour party, Clement Attlee among them, about their views on Indian independence. What struck him, he said, was how their pro-Indian sympathies took no account at all of the likely economic consequences for Britain. "They just hadn't thought about it," he said, and the memory still surprised him because he, meanwhile, was considering the economic opportunities for India and the day when all kinds of objects, especially those made of steel, need no longer fill the holds of British ships bound for Mumbai and Kolkata. Birla died in 1983 aged 90. The same year, Lakshmi Mittal, a minor figure even among Marwari businessmen, introduced new and cheaper manufacturing methods to his steel plant in Indonesia. Birla's businesses had also expanded beyond India by then, but I doubt even he could have foreseen that two decades later a fellow Marwari would be the world's biggest steelmaker. Or that one day he would meet the mayor of London in a loo in Davos and agree in a minute to spend £16m of his own money on a brilliantly convoluted decoration 100 metres high. He will also, of course, supply the steel, but as ArcelorMittal owns no plant in Britain the steel will need to come from abroad. Hidden behind the acronym, all kinds of places are possible. Not Redcar though, or Port Talbot: on the banks of the Thames, not far from the site of the old East India Dock, an imperial wheel will come full circle.

ViruRulez Newbie

ViruRulez

Posted
Posted
Looks like a broken roller coaster.
The TOI calls it the Eiffel Tower in a drunken state :haha:
:hysterical::hysterical::hysterical::hysterical: really I dont know how it is art .. maybe the meaning of art has changed .. as somebody said modern art :giggle: No offense but it seems Mittal has again given some offer to Britain this time round .. I dont understand why any country would select such a structure as an Olympic symbol .. if this is the trend then maybe what things will represent the Olympic symbols in the future :haha:
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...