The ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in Stratford belongs to a fine tradition of British construction, says Jonathan Glancey, but is it an artistic triumph as well?

Hubble bubble: Boris Johnson has hailed the ArcelorMittal Orbit as an "iconic" addition to London's skyline

Soon after leaving Liverpool Street station, the Norwich express thrums alongside the southern perimeter of the site of the London 2012 Olympics. Today, our locomotive is Sir John Betjeman, a Class 90 electric built by British Rail at Crewe Works in the late Eighties. I'm wondering what the late Poet Laureate might have made of the Olympic park, when a bullet–headed executive, one bejewelled hand clutching a shiny new Yves Saint Laurent man–bag, the other gesturing to the scarlet steel structure beyond the window, pipes up, "They say it's taller than the Eiffel Tower." His colleagues, thumbing a battery of winking, bleeping mobile phones, look moderately impressed.

"It" is the bright red ArcelorMittal Orbit, the much–trumpeted and awkwardly named Olympics observation tower, an ambitious sculpture, of sorts, by the artist Anish Kapoor and the structural designer Cecil Balmond. It looms towards the train like some gigantic Meccano model of a praying mantis made on Mars. A strange and controversial structure, its whirling, lopsided form baffles by day and intrigues by night when lit up precisely, without so much as a single watt of star–obscuring light escaping into the surrounding, bat–haunted darkness.

The Orbit is due to open to the public on Friday, at £15 a pop. This may sound like a bargain compared with a £25 ride up to the viewing galleries of the Shard, Renzo Piano's cloud–piercing tower recently completed along the Thames at London Bridge. Although given that the latter tops out at a lofty 1,012ft, it could be hard to decide which of these ascents offers the best value for money.

At 377ft high, and dubbed the "Eyeful Tower", the Orbit is nowhere near as tall as Eiffel's 1,050ft Parisian masterpiece nor, as a smiling grandmother in the seats opposite the thrusting young executives on the Norwich train assures her young charges, is it the world's biggest helter–skelter, although Boris Johnson has said that he would have liked the tower to have been fitted with slides. "There's nothing too vulgar for me!" joshed the Mayor of London at a beano held at the top of the Orbit in May to mark its completion.

It's all enough to make anyone dizzy, but as Kapoor himself says, "I wanted the sensation of instability, something that was continually in movement… it is an object that cannot be perceived as having a singular image from any one perspective. You need to journey around the object, and through it, like a Tower of Babel…" With all its many languages and jostling cultures, London itself is a modern Babel, and for Cecil Balmond this very social complexity, this great flux and vortex of people and ideas, is reflected in the apparently uncertain form of the Orbit.

Not everyone, however, is so understanding of this "Godzilla of Public Art", one of any number of nicknames sprayed, like graffiti tags on the flailing, tubular–steel limbs of this winding, gyring, Olympian Tower of Babel. "A roller coaster caught up in a spaghetti junction", "Spider Man on crack cocaine", "a giant hubbly bubbly", a "supersized mutant trombone" [one of Boris's], and, less kindly, "a perfect complement to the 2012 Olympics logo", "Tatlin shagging Eiffel".

The crude Tatlin reference is to the sensational leaning tower designed to command the skyline of Petrograd by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin; this martyrs' red monument to the Third International, envisaged soon after the October Revolution of 1917, was never built. Both Balmond and Kapoor have cited it as an influence on the Orbit's design.

As for "Empire", the Orbit has been paid for largely by Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel magnate, while Kapoor was born in Mumbai and Balmond in Sri Lanka. All three have lived in London for many years. All three have distinguished careers, while, as Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a member of the advisory panel that chose the Orbit design, says, "the collaboration between Anish Kapoor, Cecil Balmond and Lakshmi Mittal bridges art, architecture, engineering and business to produce a new landmark for London".

The talent invested in the Orbit is, or should be, undeniable. Mittal, who has stumped up £19million of the £23million needed to build the tower, is chairman and CEO of the world's largest steel producer, the Luxembourg–based ArcelorMittal. Kapoor has created some of the world's biggest, most public and most alluring artworks, notably Cloud Gate, a 100–ton mirror–polished stainless steel sculpture set in Chicago's AT&T Plaza, and Leviathan, a sculpture comprising three enormous, interconnected 115ft purple rubber balloons squeezed, for last year's Monumenta exhibition in Paris, inside the filigree and pale green iron and steel frame of the venerable Grand Palais. Both works are compelling even if you find the idea of them overly bombastic. Balmond, meanwhile, has engineered the challenging China Central Television Tower in Beijing – a design with OMA, the Rotterdam studio of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas – and is the champion of non–linear structures.

In the wake of this dynamic trio are Richard Henley, an associate director of the engineering giant, Arup, and project director of the Orbit; Ushida Findlay, the architects charged with making the great red sculpture safe to climb; Florence Lam, Arup's global practice leader for lighting; and the many skilled workers who have turned 1,500 tons of steel sourced from around the world – 60 per cent from recycled scrap metal – especially those at Watson Steel at Lostock, Lancashire, who did all the tricky bits and made sure the various components fitted together on site with the precision of a Swiss railway locomotive.

Does all this talent add up to anything more than an Olympian folly, a walk on engineering's wild side? A riotous structure boasting twin observation towers, looking – and feeling – like a pair of stainless steel ashtrays slotted into the structure, for caged views of east London through a dervish–like dance of bright red tubular steel gained by a lift and exited down a spiral flight of 455 stairs? Well, no, not really. The going up and stepping down – no sliding – through orbits of improbable structure will be pretty much the whole point of this bravura exercise in playful, or wayward, design for the majority of the 700 visitors expected here every hour of the Olympics day, and on into the future, or what the Mayor and his team insist on calling the "Legacy".

Back on the Norwich train, I can't help feeling that the considerable talent that has gone into the Orbit might have been better spent reinvigorating and resurrecting innovative large–scale manufacturing in Britain. Watson Steel is based close by the closed Horwich railway works, a site being given over to glum housing, shopping and leisure, while the Orbit rises from the former Stratford Works where east Londoners once built and maintained trains. Enough, though, of this Betjemanesque dreaming. This is London 2012; we want fun, laughter and whirling, swirling, sliding helter–skelter towers; these, and "supersized mutant trombones".