Category Archives: France

The ArcelorMittal Orbit

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The ArcelorMittal Orbit is compared by its sponsors to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, two nineteenth century French constructions. I think a better comparison is with the Atomium, left over from the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. The Atomium is accessible to visitors, and gives the kind of view of Brussels you’d expect from its peripheral location in Heysel Park, north of the city, with the addition of a hundred metres or so of elevation. Originally, of course, it gave a modestly elevated view of the World’s Fair. Show us what you can see from a hundred metres above a suburban festival park, plus lunch: it’s not a strong brief for a project, but in that something like the ArcelorMittal Orbit or the Atomium can be said to meet a practical purpose at all, this is that purpose. The Statue of Liberty? That gives you a view of the Manhattan skyline from across the water of New York Harbour; not life-changing, perhaps, but notable. The Eiffel Tower? That gives you a view over Paris from the city centre, plus an excellent lunch (if you can afford it). At the time of construction, the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure (taking the title from the Washington Monument, surprisingly). If – as is not the case with the Orbit – your pointless project can claim a compelling location and at least one superlative, you’re off to a reasonable start.

Beyond function, though, lies the issue of icon-icity. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to do the cultural job of a Statue of Liberty or an Eiffel Tower; It’s supposed to be a draw, simply in virtue of its design. Here, my tone is snarky, but I actually do think we have something that doesn’t just fall short, we have a wreck. I’m going to try to say why this is, and why it matters.

Many pubic artworks get a beasting, of course. People have come to love Gormley’s Angel of the North after hating it. I don’t think this will happen with the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

First, there’s a problem of resonance. What connections are we supposed to make when we experience the Orbit? The Atomium – my preferred comparator – is defiantly ahistorical. It’s said to represent an iron molecule; if we were to think sufficiently airy thoughts about the Atomium, we might say that it stood as a metonym for its own substance: steel, mostly. Materials science: very 1958. You have to try that bit harder with the ArcelorMittal Orbit. The designers talk vaguely about the idea of structural instability and the Tower of Babel (intending the Breughel painting, I’d guess, but it’s possible that they got in a muddle and were actually thinking of the Monument to the Third International). Now those are odd choices: the confounding of language, the scattering of nations, things falling over; is there a cautionary intent here? Are we celebrating these things? As for what’s unstated, I suppose the creative team would be pleased if spectators were to think of any of the following clever things (in no particular order): Klein bottles, Calabi-Yau manifolds, trombones, flayings. But the ArcelorMittal Orbit also calls to mind the dull precedents of Wembley Stadium (the tubular latticing) and the observatory towers of the New York World’s Fair of 1964 (the round observation deck). I don’t think the designers intended those associations; I think they just stumbled into them.

Worse, the design is conceptually weak. This isn’t an accusation to be tossed around casually, but I have reasons. Early sketches show a continuous, looping line or thin tube of constant thickness. Apparently the team then attempted to force a lift, a stair and a viewing platform / restaurant into that form, distorting it in the process. What’s more, the designers didn’t apply a ‘language’ to these new but essential items; instead, they used ordinary geometry and neutral colours. This suggests a wishing away. Most architects recognise (eventually) that wishing away won’t work and learn to integrate what’s needed within the framework of a concept that’s developed in anticipation.

There’s also compromise in the proposal’s major expressive component: the looping tube(s). In other pieces by Kapoor, tubes appear as you’d expect tubes to appear: as continuous surfaces. In the ArcelorMittal Orbit, though, the tube(s) is realised as an open lattice. This contradicts the design team’s formal choice. Now there are good structural reasons for using a lattice; triangles are very rigid and surfaces offer more wind resistance than open frames. Wind forces on tall structures are significant. One major structural concept selected for the Eiffel Tower aims to optimise for wind overturning; this concept gave the tower its tapering profile. (I say ‘aims to optimise’; it may in fact not be optimal.) But there’s no such alignment of thinking in the Orbit. It looks instead as though a decision was made – cynically – to maximise the use of steel componentry. The project’s sponsor, of course, is Lakshmi Mittal.

Finally, and worst of all, the ArcelorMittal Orbit is literally repulsive; it’s blood red, it looks biological, like intestines. Here, we leave the Atomium far behind: the Atomium doesn’t disgust. I don’t want to speculate on human psychology but it’s conceivable that disgust responses are ‘hardwired’, as they say. If this is so, then even if the current cohort learns to love the ArcelorMittal Orbit, having mastered its own shock reaction, there’ll be future generations who’ll be disposed to hate it.

Some say they enjoy being shocked. Some film directors know this. In his War of the Worlds remake, Spielberg has his aliens keep humans in steel cages slung beneath the rear of their tripods; when the aliens get peckish, a round hatch like a camera iris gapes open (cue horrible screaming) and a large hollow blood red tentacle comes out and has a good feel around for a flailing limb. Once it limpets on, it sucks the victim into the tripod interior. You see this and you think: OK, Mr Spielberg, you got us, that’s truly disgusting. You are the master here. Anyway, the point is that the ArcelorMittal Orbit reminds me of that scene. You too, most likely. So visitors to the 2012 London Olympics are going to get to enjoy something that resonates with gore. You might wonder if that’s what they will have been wanting.

Any public benefit / disbenefit point is of course arguable. Like most, I think we’re better off with a permissive approach to public art; one that steers well clear of entartete kunst thinking. But we’re not talking about your run of the mill art project. To the extent that the ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to represent Britain – not that Britain asked to be represented in this way – it looks to me like a bad mistake to pull out something like this. Obvious interest-promotion; a failed attempt at cleverness; laziness; provocative sourness, even. Probably not what you want in an official culture, if you’re going to have one at all.

The Glorious Fourth

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When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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Random thoughts on returning from French Africa

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If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.

If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not for much longer. Demographic growth plus the slow-but-steady rise of literacy rates in most of Africa means that by the next decade, most literate Francophones will be African too.
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Rio to Paris

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As media furiously refrain from speculating, it’s odd to be hoping that a lightning strike, an electrical malfunction, or some combination of both was responsible for the crash of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean last night while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Because there aren’t a whole lot of other possibilities that don’t involve explosions.

While flying between the two cities is far, far safer than driving regularly in either of them, the stratosphere is an unforgiving environment, and the possibility of deliberate harm is also still out there. A sad day for both countries.

Bad Russian Radar

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An unexpected consequence of the North Korean attempted satellite launch was that it has demonstrated that Russian early-warning radar coverage is poor. Specifically, the Russians didn’t detect the North Korean launch at all; they picked up the object during its suborbital flight, but not during its ascent. This is worrying, because it suggests two things – first of all, that the Russians would only get warning of a missile launched from that direction when it was already about to re-enter the atmosphere, giving them very little time to analyse the situation, and secondly, that the US Groundbased Midcourse Defense interceptors based on the Pacific coast could, if launched to intercept a North Korean missile, appear on the Russian radars flying up over the edge of the Earth, as if they were incoming North Korean, Chinese, or US submarine-launched missiles.

This obviously involves some pretty awful risks, and it is another good reason to be sceptical of GMD; in a real crisis, would it actually be wise to fire it? If not, of course, it’s useless and the potential enemy can be expected to take account of that. Worse, however, is that the Russians are bound to consider a radar contact from that direction more threatening than one from over the Pole, from the West, or from the South, directions in which they have much better coverage. Therefore, the very fact of the weakness is destabilising; it increases the perceived importance of quick reaction, and therefore the coupling between Russian and other missile/radar complexes. With the increasing numbers of ballistic missiles in Asia – Indian as well as Chinese, North Korean, or submarine-based – this is not good news.

It’s been suggested that one solution would be a Joint Data Exchange Centre, a headquarters in Moscow in which US and Russian staff would swap information from their warning systems. This has a serious problem; if one party is willing to launch a first nuclear strike, they are surely also willing to feed fake data to the JDEC and to accept the imminent death of their representatives there. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be credible. Hence another plan, RAMOS (Russian-American Missile Observation Satellite). This foresaw that the US would finance and help build a constellation of satellites similar to its own Defense Support Program birds, which detect rocket launches worldwide using infrared cameras, which would broadcast their data in the clear so that both powers (and anyone else) could receive it and use it independently. Both parties would participate in their development, and would be able to do anything they liked to verify the satellite before launching it on one of their own rockets. (Perhaps now we could publish the design under the GPL.)

This Clinton administration idea, however, failed to get funding back in 1999 and was promptly canned by the Bush administration as far too sane. Perhaps it could be resurrected. Or alternatively, whatever the Americans think, why shouldn’t the European Union do it? The radar position is not as bad in our direction, but the Russians have their own missile-defence interceptors that do fly out our way, and there was that horrible business with the Norwegian research rocket. We have a serious space industry, and the French would be wholly delighted; they consider space power to be a major national priority anyway. It’s better than relying on another Stanislas Petrov.

giant centrifuge arm for whole ships considered cool

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The French government is moving its ministry of defence, pulling a whole gaggle of institutions together into a “French Pentagon” to be built on an old Navy site in the suburbs of Paris. Obviously there are the usual complaints, but this is interesting. Jean-Dominique Merchet’s Sécret Défense reports that they are going to knock down a giant circular water tank with a huge rotating arm. Eh?

Well, the site was the R&D centre for French naval shipbuilding, and the installation was used to test the hull design of new ships. A scale model (“scale model” here means something that weighs about as much as an articulated truck) would be built and spun through the water at high speed on the end of the arm, driven by huge electric motors, so the engineers could observe the turbulence it created in the water. The thing is 60 metres in radius, 5.5 metres deep, and the arm moves at 17 degrees a second

These days, we can solve fluid dynamics problems with a Really Big Computer instead, so the thing is losing some of its relevance. But it seems a shame to flatten it and build offices; someone really ought to get some photos taken before the bulldozers move in. A few are here and they are suitably science-fictional.

City on Fire

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On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more than 2300 tons of the substance when a fire below turned into an explosion that produced a mushroom cloud reminiscent of an atomic blast. The Texas City waterfront was also home to chemical plants, and storage facilities for numerous petrochemical products. Many of these also caught fire and exploded in part. Several hundred people died; the exact total is unknown because of the completeness of the destruction at the explosion’s center.
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