- Email: [email protected]
The business of taking on malaria
CULTURELAB
Snake of steel Some will love and others hate London’s Olympic landmark, finds Shaoni Bhattacharya “THE engineering is the art, and the art is the engineering.” So says Cecil Balmond, structural engineer, designer and artist, who together with Turner prizewinning sculptor Anish Kapoor has created an innovative tower that challenges conventions in engineering and design to commemorate the 2012 Olympic games in London. Next month, the last piece of red, snaking steel will be placed atop London’s newest landmark: the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park in Stratford, London. At 115 metres high, the sculpture will be the UK’s tallest, towering over the Statue of Liberty. Built by engineers at international firm Arup, the tower is made from 2200 tonnes of steel provided by steel company ArcelorMittal, which is stumping up £19.6 million of the £22.3 million price tag.
Arcelor Mittal
The ArcelorMittal Orbit‘s innovative design is primeval and not polite
52 | NewScientist | 27 August 2011
limits at the top and bottom. At the bottom limit, the looping is cut off, leaving the sculpture supported on an inherently stable tripod. “It’s very, very stable even though it looks energetic and is not a traditional form,” says Balmond. Adding to this stability, the tower has a swinging steel pendulum, called a “tuned mass damper”, which stops the top of the tower wobbling. “The structure is stable but flexible like a tree,” says Holger Falter, the lead engineer behind the tower at Arup. Balmond adds that in most towers gravity acts vertically, but in the ArcelorMittal Orbit it acts through the points where the
Kapoor and Balmond’s design was a direct response to a call from London’s mayor Boris Johnson for an iconic tower for the games. We thought: what can we do that is different, recalls Balmond, who runs the Balmond Studio in London. Most towers are the same: vertical, flaring out at the bottom and thinning at the top, says Balmond, who until recently headed up Arup’s Advanced “The sculpture follows an Geometry Unit. “What could be orbit, linking with itself for different is an orbit,” he says. The sculpture follows an orbit, linking stability. A steel pendulum dampens any wobbles” with itself for stability. “Like a planetary orbit it goes round and looping steel meets. round and round and is stable. So Other practical challenges instead of a straight continuous cone, we have an orbit,which each had to be overcome. Falter says mathematics allowed them to time it passes itself it connects.” To design the tower along these calculate wind forces on the tower precisely, and that the tower’s lines, Balmond and Kapoor took spread-out base reduces these. two foci in space and made the Balmond holds that the artistic structure loop continuously and engineering aspects of the round them in a figure of eight tower work together. “There are motion. They used a computer no compromises on structure and program to do this, specifying art – they both make the same statement,” he says. The statement is the sculpture’s dynamism and energy, which the designers hope will give the visitor a “narrative in space”. Like much of Kapoor’s work, the ArcelorMittal Orbit plays with notions of light and dark, with visitors entering the tower through a sunken black crater to be taken up to the light upper observation decks in a lift. Balmond knows that not everyone will applaud their creation. “It’s primeval. It’s not polite. It’s strong. People will read things into it. Some will love it. Some will hate it.” But he adds: “I hope people will enjoy moving through its narrative.”
Malaria business Lifeblood: How to change the world one dead mosquito at a time by Alex Perry, Public Affairs, $25.99/£16.99 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie
IN THE past decade, there has been a revolution in the way the world fights disease and poverty: the rich got involved. We all know how Bill Gates reinvented the fight against scourges from AIDS to hunger. But he isn’t alone. This slim, well-written volume tells the story Ray Chambers, who helped invent the aggressive financial dealing that gave the getrich-quick 1980s its bad name. He decided that getting rich was not enough – that happiness required bringing others along too. Or at least that’s what this book says. What is undeniable is that Chambers has spearheaded a largely unheralded campaign to deliver bed nets to regions hammered by malaria. And bed nets work: malaria has been driven back across Africa and Asia. As it recedes, prosperity rises. This story reaches far beyond malaria, though, claiming the campaign has revealed the futility – even the intrinsic immorality – of the mainstream aid business, from charities to United Nations agencies. Only if helping the poor is done in the self-interested business style of the rich, argues Perry, can we lift humanity out of poverty. This sweeping judgment doesn’t quite stand up. The business world’s methods can work resoundingly well, and this book advances the debate on how to leverage that into real, global development. But while there’s plenty of waste and wrongheadedness in the aid business, a few cherry-picked examples are not enough to demonstrate that the business methods of the rich are the only other way.
Snake of steel Some will love and others hate London’s Olympic landmark, finds Shaoni Bhattacharya “THE engineering is the art, and the art is the engineering.” So says Cecil Balmond, structural engineer, designer and artist, who together with Turner prizewinning sculptor Anish Kapoor has created an innovative tower that challenges conventions in engineering and design to commemorate the 2012 Olympic games in London. Next month, the last piece of red, snaking steel will be placed atop London’s newest landmark: the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park in Stratford, London. At 115 metres high, the sculpture will be the UK’s tallest, towering over the Statue of Liberty. Built by engineers at international firm Arup, the tower is made from 2200 tonnes of steel provided by steel company ArcelorMittal, which is stumping up £19.6 million of the £22.3 million price tag.
Arcelor Mittal
The ArcelorMittal Orbit‘s innovative design is primeval and not polite
52 | NewScientist | 27 August 2011
limits at the top and bottom. At the bottom limit, the looping is cut off, leaving the sculpture supported on an inherently stable tripod. “It’s very, very stable even though it looks energetic and is not a traditional form,” says Balmond. Adding to this stability, the tower has a swinging steel pendulum, called a “tuned mass damper”, which stops the top of the tower wobbling. “The structure is stable but flexible like a tree,” says Holger Falter, the lead engineer behind the tower at Arup. Balmond adds that in most towers gravity acts vertically, but in the ArcelorMittal Orbit it acts through the points where the
Kapoor and Balmond’s design was a direct response to a call from London’s mayor Boris Johnson for an iconic tower for the games. We thought: what can we do that is different, recalls Balmond, who runs the Balmond Studio in London. Most towers are the same: vertical, flaring out at the bottom and thinning at the top, says Balmond, who until recently headed up Arup’s Advanced “The sculpture follows an Geometry Unit. “What could be orbit, linking with itself for different is an orbit,” he says. The sculpture follows an orbit, linking stability. A steel pendulum dampens any wobbles” with itself for stability. “Like a planetary orbit it goes round and looping steel meets. round and round and is stable. So Other practical challenges instead of a straight continuous cone, we have an orbit,which each had to be overcome. Falter says mathematics allowed them to time it passes itself it connects.” To design the tower along these calculate wind forces on the tower precisely, and that the tower’s lines, Balmond and Kapoor took spread-out base reduces these. two foci in space and made the Balmond holds that the artistic structure loop continuously and engineering aspects of the round them in a figure of eight tower work together. “There are motion. They used a computer no compromises on structure and program to do this, specifying art – they both make the same statement,” he says. The statement is the sculpture’s dynamism and energy, which the designers hope will give the visitor a “narrative in space”. Like much of Kapoor’s work, the ArcelorMittal Orbit plays with notions of light and dark, with visitors entering the tower through a sunken black crater to be taken up to the light upper observation decks in a lift. Balmond knows that not everyone will applaud their creation. “It’s primeval. It’s not polite. It’s strong. People will read things into it. Some will love it. Some will hate it.” But he adds: “I hope people will enjoy moving through its narrative.”
Malaria business Lifeblood: How to change the world one dead mosquito at a time by Alex Perry, Public Affairs, $25.99/£16.99 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie
IN THE past decade, there has been a revolution in the way the world fights disease and poverty: the rich got involved. We all know how Bill Gates reinvented the fight against scourges from AIDS to hunger. But he isn’t alone. This slim, well-written volume tells the story Ray Chambers, who helped invent the aggressive financial dealing that gave the getrich-quick 1980s its bad name. He decided that getting rich was not enough – that happiness required bringing others along too. Or at least that’s what this book says. What is undeniable is that Chambers has spearheaded a largely unheralded campaign to deliver bed nets to regions hammered by malaria. And bed nets work: malaria has been driven back across Africa and Asia. As it recedes, prosperity rises. This story reaches far beyond malaria, though, claiming the campaign has revealed the futility – even the intrinsic immorality – of the mainstream aid business, from charities to United Nations agencies. Only if helping the poor is done in the self-interested business style of the rich, argues Perry, can we lift humanity out of poverty. This sweeping judgment doesn’t quite stand up. The business world’s methods can work resoundingly well, and this book advances the debate on how to leverage that into real, global development. But while there’s plenty of waste and wrongheadedness in the aid business, a few cherry-picked examples are not enough to demonstrate that the business methods of the rich are the only other way.