“A monument for a post-monumental age”

The FT, 9 April 2010

These snaps taken from a recent site visit, show Orbit rising up fast.

“The Olympic project came by us (Anish and Balmond) sitting again and thinking: “What do we do?” Because the brief was calling for at least a hundred and twenty meter high tower. Apart from the observation deck, I started to think and analyze that the tower form, and Eiffel was the reference, that it’s a completely extenuated form, attenuated, constantly connected to itself. I realized that somehow, instead of a continuous form, that I could pick up points in space that would still give the hologram, almost, of a continuous form. So that continuity of structure may not be completely extruded..vertically….it could be disconnected at moments, like a cloud. And I came up then with the idea that an Orbit that could pass by itself and connect to itself would give, in the end, enough of points to take a load down to the ground, without being restricted between the points. And so, in the genesis, ultimately, there was a kind of ‘elipsoidian’ space.”

Cecil Balmond in conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, reflecting on The Orbit.
Open Source symposium, Porto 2011