Mick Hartley

There's still work to do on the viewing platform, but all the red twirly bits are now in place. Behold, the ArcelorMittal Orbit:

The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey, talking to the project engineer Cecil Balmond:

"Anish [Kapoor] and I were thinking how do you beat the Eiffel Tower?" says Balmond. "But then reality hit, with budgets. We didn't exactly come down to Earth, although we reduced the height by 50 metres or so, but we began to explore what could be different in a tower. We came up with the idea of an orbiting structure on the edge of the vulnerable, one where the form looks tenuous. A structure that was not obvious to read."

This way of thinking and visualizing out loud led to the improbable, if perfectly stable, structure you see today at Stratford between the Olympic Stadium and Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre. "We knew we were moving away from pure sculpture and from architecture and engineering," says Balmond, "and we knew there'd be a hostile, or confused, reaction at first. That happened to Eiffel, too. It was Hans-Ulrich Obrist [of the Serpentine Gallery] who said, we should think of the Orbit not as art or engineering but as a 'laboratory of space'. We jumped on the phrase!"

Well, if it keeps them happy. I like the thing anyway.