Archinect - News

Danish Architecture Center unveils new four-story slide by artist Carsten Höller

2020-06-15T14:48:00-04:00

With the reopening of Danish Architecture Center last week, Copenhagen welcomed a new art attraction: a 40-meter/130-foot-long tube slide spiraling down four stories inside DAC's boxy, OMA-designed BLOX home.

Photo: Kontraframe

Envisioned by German-Belgian artist Carsten Höller, famous for installing similar slides at art institutions around the world, the 15-meter/50-foot-tall DAC Slide is part of the Center's initiative to appeal to a broader audience and extend its range beyond the professional architecture community.

Photo: Kontraframe

"Why don’t we use slides in architecture as a supplement to stairs, elevators and escalators?" Carsten Höller commented on this latest piece. "They are fast, safe and energy-savvy — and they produce a sensation in the user that has been described as 'a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind, somewhere between delight and madness.'"

Photo: Kontraframe

Installing the enormous 4-ton slide took 21 days and required 13 slide sections, 94 pl...

"The most useless totem pole of mayoral hubris": Oliver Wainwright rides the ArcelorMittal Orbit

2016-06-23T18:06:00-04:00

Never has an attraction promised so much yet delivered so little. It was the roller coaster without a ride, the helter skelter without a slide, a £20m mountain of steel leering above London’s lean Olympic stadium as a mocking monument to the vanity of the city’s former mayor, Boris Johnson, and its funder, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal [...] As Guy de Maupassant said of the Eiffel Tower, being inside the Orbit is the best place to be – because it’s the only place you don’t have to look at it

Ouch.

Yet, it's not all bad: "...when you’re hurtling down through the structure’s contorted loops on the new corkscrew slide that opens this weekend, all this can be momentarily forgiven," opines Wainwright.

In related news:

Carsten Höller to unveil his ArcelorMittal Orbit slide in June

2016-04-27T17:49:00-04:00

Höller wanted to show that you don’t necessarily get to know a sculpture better by literally travelling through it; that once inside it begins to look like something else entirely... The Slide, a permanent fixture at London’s Olympic Park, will give people a full 40 seconds to experience this and decide for themselves as they make their way down the 178m chute at an estimated 15mph.

Artist Carsten Höller to wrap world's longest tunnel slide around the ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower in London

2015-08-03T15:03:00-04:00

This week, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London announced that “the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide” will wrap around Anish Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” When the sculpture went up in 2009 after winning a design challenge, it proceeded to receive mostly scathing reviews — and a spot on the shortlist of the 2012 Carbuncle Cup [...]. Today, Kapoor revealed that the slide is actually a work of art, designed by none other than Carsten Höller at Kapoor’s own invitation.

In other artsy-slide-related news on Archinect:

Artist Carsten Höller to install massive slides on London's Hayward Gallery

2015-04-13T15:32:00-04:00

Now visitors will be able to descend from the Hayward gallery’s glass pyramid ceiling to its entrance level on one of two 15-metre slides commissioned for an exhibition opening later this year. Built into the gallery’s exterior wall, the slides will “constitute a graceful sculptural installation” while also being a device for “experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness”, [Carsten Höller] said.

Previously, Höller had created a similar installation for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2006. The slides were very popular with the public, although also responsible for several injuries.

For his upcoming exhibit at the Hayward Gallery, Höller has also created "Flying Machines," which are intended to give visitors the sensation of flying over Waterloo Bridge. Additionally, the exhibit, entitled "Carsten Höller: Decision," will include two robotic beds that “mirror each other’s movements as they roam the galleries."

Höller is known for provocative, often-interactive installations. His piece "Pill Clock" comprises a ceiling-mounted clock that drops more than 1 million white pills while the exhibit is up, with visitors allowed to take and consume the pills. Höller came to prominence concurrently with artists like Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Andrea Zittel and Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose work displays a shared interest in provoking unexpected and novel interactions between the art w...

Carsten Höller Is Installing a Slide at New Museum

2011-10-07T12:28:13-04:00

If all goes as planned, the New Museum’s five-year-old building on the Bowery will become something of an amusement park beginning Oct. 26, with visitors hurtling through a giant plastic tube from the fourth floor to the second

The Slippery Slope at Tate Modern

2006-10-08T21:39:00-04:00

Making a piece that works in Tate Modern's vast turbine hall is far from child's play - Carsten Holler has responded to the challenge by turning the space into a giant playground. The artist tells Lynn Barber why riding his huge, curving, steel slides will change our perceptions and set us free. Observer, installation pics.