Now we'll be able to inhabit one of Kapoor's signature shapes

Anish Kapoor has long encouraged deep interaction with his work, playing with our reflection in his concave mirrors, and sucking us into his apparently endless "voids" cut into pieces of stone, the wall or the floor.

At his best, he can create a profound optical, physical and emotional experience from prompting this intimate engagement with his sculptures.

And with the Orbit, for the first time, we can actually enter and inhabit one of them.

The tower encapsulates many familiar Kapoor forms and themes. At its core is an arterial shape - an upended version of Marsyas, his vast sculpture for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Around that are coiled, latticed, vaguely intestinal tubes which remind me of Slug (2009), a sculpture in his recent Royal Academy show. This interplay between bodily shapes and grand architecture is a key element in Kapoor's artistic armoury. So too is the colour red, which he once said he prized because it "has fantastic darkness in it".

But there is, for me, an entirely new, sci-fi feel about the Orbit, owing to the UFO-like viewing platform at its summit. The coils then begin to look like traces of movement - contrails as much as entrails. I've always found Kapoor's monumental works - many, like the Orbit, realised in collaboration with Cecil Balmond - impressive as engineering feats but less absorbing than his smaller sculptures. Orbit is an intriguing and ambitious creation, but will it possess the magic of Kapoor's best work? We have a little while to wait and see.

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