Brief encounter lays foundation for towering pipe dream
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday April 2, 2010
LONDON: A chance 45-second chat in a cloakroom at the World Economic Forum in Davos has spawned Britain's tallest sculpture, which will be built for the London Olympics and soar higher than Big Ben.The chat, between the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Europe's richest man, Lakshmi Mittal, ended with the Anglo-Indian steel magnate agreeing to pay for the materials to build the tower.The result will be a red 120-metre tower looping and twisting into the sky to give visitors to the 2012 Games a different view of the British capital from East London.The design the renowned public artist, the Indian-born English sculptor Annish Kapoor, it has immediately been nicknamed the "hubble bubble" for its shape, reminiscent of a hookah pipe."After 18 months of construction on the site we knew we didn't have any cash but we would need a prodigious quantity of steel," Mr Johnson said."I was racking my brains to think of anyone I knew who had large quantities of steel. In Davos, in the cloakroom, who should I bump into but Lakshmi Mittal. We'd never been introduced before."It wasn't a 60-second conversation, it was a 45-second conversation. I framed the idea, which took about 40 seconds and he immediately, immediately, said, 'I'll give you the steel'."Kapoor won the commission from an shortlist that included Antony Gormley, who designed the huge Angel of the North sculpture outside Newcastle.Kapoor, who had a sell-out sculpture show at the Royal Academy in London last year, collaborated on the project with his friend Cecil Balmond, one of the world's leading structural engineers.It is estimated that about 1400 tonnes of steel will be used.Kapoor said one of his references was the Tower of Babel."There is a kind of mediaeval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible, a procession, if you like. It's a long winding spiral, a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it."
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald