ArcelorMittal Orbit
— — a red helix that keeps changing its mind.
Not only on a wall.
“The tallest sculpture in Britain, in the park built for the 2012 Games. A looping red lattice by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, 114 metres above the Lea Valley, with the Olympic Stadium at its foot and the towers of Stratford beyond. Carsten Höller's tunnel slide spirals down through the steel for twelve turns. The Orbit is a thing that resists being seen the same way twice. — from the studio
ArcelorMittal Orbit, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The ArcelorMittal Orbit stands 114.5 metres tall in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, the tallest sculpture in the United Kingdom. It was designed by artist Anish Kapoor with structural engineer Cecil Balmond, commissioned for the 2012 London Olympics and funded largely by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, whose company gave the work its name. The structure uses about 2,000 tonnes of steel, much of it recycled. A two-deck observation platform sits at 76 and 80 metres above the park.
Strictly the form is steel, not stone, but the engineering carries the building. Cecil Balmond's lattice wraps a continuous helix around an off-centre core, so the structure reads differently from every direction on the ground. The exterior was painted in a deep oxide red drawn from Indian pigment traditions Kapoor has worked with since the 1970s. In 2016 the artist Carsten Höller added a 178-metre tunnel slide that descends through twelve turns and two corkscrews, then the longest of its kind in the world.
The Orbit sits a short walk from Stratford station, reached by the Jubilee line, the Central line, the Elizabeth line, and the DLR. The viewing platform and the slide run on timed-entry tickets booked through the official site, with seasonal hours and reduced winter operation. From the deck the view reaches the City and Canary Wharf to the west, the Stadium and the Aquatics Centre below, and on a clear day the rim of the North Downs to the south. The slide ride takes about forty seconds.