London's ArcelorMittal Orbit Leads to Controversy Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images The ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture, center, and a building at the entrance of the Olympic Park in Stratford. LONDON - Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has said that the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a spiraling goliath of red tangled steel that stands 35 stories above the city's Olympic Park, would have "dwarfed" the aspirations of Gustave Eiffel and "boggled the minds" of the ancient Romans. Many Londoners don't see it quite that way. They've called the Orbit, designed by the Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor and the Sri Lankan architect Cecil Balmond, the "Eye-full Tower" and "Helter-Skelter," and have compared it to a "contorted mass of entrails." Envisioned as a symbol of London looming over the site of this summer's Olympic Games, the Orbit, which visitors will enter, ascend and explore, is designed as an attraction to rival the London Eye and Big Ben for decades to come. And, at least for now, the sculpture is also serving as a prime target for British Olympic crankiness. "The most lasting legacy of the multimillion-pound circus about to roll into town will be a big red clot on the landscape," the columnist Catherine Cain wrote of the Orbit in The Watford Observer, the newspaper of a town near London. One of the most visible additions to the London skyline in decades and its tallest sculptural tower (about 70 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty), the Orbit has drawn criticism not just for its avant-garde design, but as a symbol - in spite of its mostly private financing - of the billions in government money being spent on the Olympics at a time when Britons are struggling under austerity measures put in place by the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron. The project has also brought out Londoners" complicated feelings about public art, several people involved in the project said. "We have a funny view about public art in Britain - it's seen as slightly odd and elitist," said John Simpson, an architect at Ushida Findlay, a London firm that helped transform the sculpture into a structurally sound, functional building. The Orbit has had a more favorable reception among art and architecture critics. That the tower, which will open to the public with the start of the games on July 27, will have an admission price of £15 ($23), on top of the £10 ($15) entrance fee to the park, only adds to a widespread perception of excess and elitism. In an interview Mr. Kapoor called the Orbit's entry fee "a lot of money for a lot of people" and said after the Olympics he'd like a price that matched his vision of a "democratic monument open to all." Mr. Cameron has promoted the city's post-Olympic plans to develop the derelict district of Stratford in East London into a mixed-use development, with the Orbit as a focal point. "I think it's time to tear up any notion of the Olympics" leaving behind white elephants," Mr. Cameron said in a news conference. But 51 percent of British residents surveyed in March said they disagreed with Mr. Cameron's statements that the Olympic Games would be well worth the £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion) cost to taxpayers, according to ComRes, a polling company. Government officials have since said that that figure has risen by an estimated 20 percent to £11 billion ($17.2 billion), driven largely by the cost of security. The Orbit project got its start in 2009 after Mr. Johnson ran into Lakshmi N. Mittal, the chief executive of the huge steel maker ArcelorMittal and one of the world's richest men, at the coat check room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The mayor pitched Mr. Mittal the idea of building something to add artistic panache to the Olympic Park. Constrained by Britain's deep recession, the city, Mr. Johnson told Mr. Mittal, needed a private donation to build its largest public art project in decades. Mr. Mittal contributed £19.6 million pounds (or $31.4 million), almost the entire budget of the project, to have the sculpture named after his company. Nearly 60 percent of the more than 2,000 tons of steel used to make the Orbit came from recycled scrap. The materials were procured from every continent in which ArcelorMittal operates and were assembled in a factory near Manchester.