Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: the completed ArcelorMittal Orbit tower has opened its doors to critics, who unlike Dezeen readers have welcomed the gigantic steel structure by artist Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond.

Reporting for the Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones suggests that the sculpture’s opponents are “missing a lot of fun”. Despite comparing the tower’s form to a bulbous living creature that might “vacuum up the Olympic crowd, or fart on everyone” the writer declares the project to be “extremely coherent in its meaning”.

Mark Hudson of the Telegraph says that the Orbit doesn’t fail to overwhelm and entertain, and calls the project ”a challenging twist on the idea of the tower as viewing point and visitor attraction”.

However, in an article for art magazine Frieze journalist Douglas Murphy suggests that unlike monuments such as the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, the Orbit has a “jolly abstraction” that is “a telling reflection of its blankly cynical patronage”.

While the design appears to have divided opinion, the £15 price tag of each ticket has been unanimously criticised. In an interview with the BBC even Anish Kapoor agrees that the cost is “a hell of a lot of money”.

When we first revealed the design back in 2010 readers were outraged by it. Read the original story and comments here and see images of the completed tower here.

Read more stories about the London 2012 Olympics in our dedicated category.

Dezeen Wire: Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has been accused of “bleeding Valencia dry” over alleged fees of €100 million for the showpiece City of the Arts and Science cultural centre in the city – The Guardian

Leftwing Spanish political party Esquerra Unida claims the architect had a deal with the conservative-led regional government to earn a percentage of construction costs for the complex, which have spiralled to a rumoured €1.1 billion.

Last month, Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett reported that Spanish ministers were blaming profligate regional administrations for Spain’s budget deficit, with showpiece architectural projects singled out for criticism.

Tremlett, the paper’s Madrid correspondent, seems to have a bee in his bonnet about extravagant Spanish architecture: in October he reported on the closure of the newly opened Niemeyer Centre in Avilés, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, and listed Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela among a string of other white elephants; while back in 2009 he reported on how a slew of grandiose schemes – including projects by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Alejandro Zaera Polo – were hitting the buffers due to the credit crunch and Spain’s looming economic woes.

Santiago Calatrava projects featured on Dezeen include the Liège-Guillemins station in Belgium and a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice.

Dezeen Wire: Chelsea Football Club have made an offer to buy Battersea Power Station in south London, with plans to redevelop it into a 60,000 capacity stadium – BBC

Creditors of previous owners Treasury Holdings put the building up for sale in January. See abandoned plans for the site by Rafael Viñoly here and  a more recent alternative proposal by Terry Farrell here.

Dezeen Wire: New York Times technology reporter Jenna Wortham investigates how crowd-funding site Kickstarter is changing industrial design – New York Times

The article focusses on the success story of the Pebble watch , which has to date received a record-breaking $7,718,678 of pledges through the platform with 17 days still to go. See our story about it here.

Read more about Kickstarter on Dezeen here and watch an interview about crowd-sourcing and open design with Domus editor-in-chief Joseph Grima here.

Dezeen Wire: Rem Koolhaas’ architecture and urban planning practice OMA scored highest in a competition between ten firms seeking to win the right to oversee an ambitious expansion of Moscow.

The development will help redistribute housing and employment opportunities to a 150,000 hectare site to the southwest of the city and involves creating new infrastructure for transport, industry and energy provision.

See all of our stories about OMA here.

The following information is from OMA:

OMA wins first round of the Moscow City Agglomeration Development Concept Competition

Moscow, 27 April, 2012 | A consortium of experts led by OMA scored the highest of the 10 teams that completed the first stage of the competition to develop the concept of the Moscow Agglomeration.

In 2011, the Russian Federation Council confirmed that the city of Moscow will annex 150,000 hectares to the southwest, making Moscow 2.4 times its current size. The expansion is designed to relieve pressure on the historic city center by redistributing the working places to the annexed part of the Moscow Oblast, thereby addressing transport, ecological and social issues that result from high levels of commuting. Before Moscow’s new administrative borders come into force in July this year, the Council called for a concept for the development of the Moscow Agglomeration, and in February this year the Council invited 10 teams to participate in the development of this concept.

For the first round of the competition, focused on a plan for the Moscow Agglomeration as a whole, OMA proposed a joint framework for the development of Moscow and the Moscow Oblast, under which the administrative border and political mandate could address the entirety of the Agglomeration. OMA proposed logistical hubs outside Moscow’s current boundaries which would be linked to the City and the Oblast through high-speed rail, integrating all forms of infrastructure: transport, broadband, industry, and energy provisions. The proposal also suggested that the development would not rely solely on government funding, but could introduce a public/private mix.

On the proposed development strategy, OMA Partner-in-charge Reinier de Graaf says, “We are very honored to participate in such an ambitious project. In launching this plan, the authorities have taken an important step in addressing the problems of the city at the appropriate scale: Moscow’s proposed expansion becomes a reason to develop a single integrated future for Moscow and the Oblast.”

The OMA team working with AMO, its internal research studio, is led by Reinier de Graaf and Associate Laura Baird. The concept is being developed together with a core team consisting of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Project Meganom and Siemens. This core team will be supported by an advisory board which includes McKinsey, Ricky Burdett, Saskia Sassen, member of the Committee for Global Thought (Columbia University), the Levada Center, West 8, and RWDI.

About OMA

OMA is a leading international office practicing architecture, urbanism and cultural analysis. Dedicated for over 30 years to the design and realization of buildings and masterplans, OMA is led by seven partners – Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, David Gianotten and Managing Partner Victor van der Chijs – and sustains an international practice with offices in Rotterdam, New York, Beijing, Hong Kong and soon Doha.

AMO, the counterpart to OMA’s architectural practice, is a research studio and advisory service working in areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture, including media, politics, sociology, renewable energy, technology, fashion, art, curating, publishing and design.