Bark-itecture

The 2010 Olympics seem to be coming along nicely. The stadium in Stratford looks lovely, the BT Tower proudly beams the countdown on London (842 days people!), and Boris Johnson hasn't been on the Today Program explaining a £9bn overspend for, literally, days. Even Crossrail is making progress. We know this because Tottenham Court Road now resembles Berlin in mid-1945, although still no one's quite sure what it's for (it's for getting from Middle Earth to Narnia, via Gatwick, if you're interested orc readers with Oyster cards).

But the Orbit Tower, really. WTF? I know it's designed by Anish Kapoor and he's a godlike genius and everything, but, really, it's terrible. It's improbably terrible. It's terrible squared. In fact, it's so bad it looks like something he came up with during one of those nights that involves king size Rizlas, industrial amounts of Haribo and an argument about who'd win in a fight between a killer whale and an aardvark on meow meow. When it seems like a eureka idea at the time but you wake up the next morning and wonder what you were thinking.


So just what was the brief? "Anish, we need you to design something that looks like what DNA would look like if it was made of giant strawberry laces and God got drunk halfway through designing it." "Sure guys. And how about a giant ashtray on the top?" "Perfect!"

I know one man's Chrysler Tower is another man's white elephant and don't want to come over all Prince Charles, but there should be a new rule in architecture. Namely: Don't design anything that you wouldn't want in your back garden. Somehow I can't picture the Kapoor family throwing back the curtains in the morning to rejoice in this hotchpotch of steel weirdness while birds tweet contentedly from its, er, tendrils.

Maybe I'm in a minority. People seem to have mixed feelings. According to the architecture correspondent in The Independent, "Its power lies in its ability to suggest an unfinished form in the process of becoming something else." Although that sounds suspiciously like an excuse I used when I handed in a crap essay at school.

One of the other contenders for the commission was Anthony Gormley. His Angel of the North was equally polarising in its day, but is much loved now. Somehow I can't see that happening with Orbit. Despite, or maybe because of its rhesus-red boldness, it lacks grace and optimism. It's a War-of-the-Worlds jumble of freakiness and, as my colleague Amar pointed out, it's got a fairground slide down the side. What we need is Gormley's Angel of the South. Or, better yet, a giant metal Kraken.