Findlay. The tower is officially named the ArcelorMittal Orbit after the steel company spent 20 million of the almost 23 million pound total cost, a memorable trip to the bathroom.
  
   While I'm yet to be invited to Davos I was extremely fortunate to spend some fascinating and memorable time of my own with the architect Kathryn Findlay when she was a guest of the Australian Institute of Architects at their national conference held in Brisbane this year. The day I met her was also the same day that the Orbit tower was unveiled to the world's media so it was of course my first line of questioning. I liked the way she re-framed it as a building with a huge sculptural presence - and that her role in this instance was to help Anish Kapoor the artist, and the engineer Cecil Balmond, get this monumental sculpture built.
  
   For an architect who is so highly regarded and conceptual in her own right, Findlay and her team embraced the role of not being the major players, but the quiet supporters who could deliver this 'non-linear form' and help the artists get this sculpture, which is actually a building, built. In the end it's also a building with all the stuff that humans need like lifts, stairs, toilets and viewing platforms, all subject to UK planning processes, yet its point was still to have a huge sculptural presence as conceived by Anish Kapoor. While many people love the Orbit, some also describe the tower as ugly, which is a good sign to me, as the tower is pushing the envelope of what's possible, just as the Eiffel Tower did so many years ago. It confronts, confounds and provokes use and contemplation along with questions about the very nature of public art.
  
   Scottish born and a graduate of London's Architectural Association, Findlay first went to Japan in 1979 to work for Arata Isozaki and subsequently set up her own practice there in 1986 which led to global recognition through the design and completion of two small but seminal houses. 1993's Truss Wall House and a year later the Soft and Hairy House. The Truss Wall House was a reinterpretation of a patented Truss Wall system that a Japanese builder had been using for 30 years. The big difference this time was that Findlay let the underlying qualities of the compound concrete material dictate the form rather than the other way around. The same applied to the Soft and Hairy House, which was incidentally the client's name for the project. 'It's about the nature of the material that becomes the fascination, the thingness, the stuffness... form that is a product of the material you use... It's always about the subject, not about me.'
  
   Having lived, worked and taught in Japan for 20 years, Findlay returned to the UK and continues her varied commissions. These have included a remarkable version of thatched roofing atop an indoor swimming pool residential building in England, which fellow architect Peter Cook wonderfully described as 'digi-thatch' and an Art Foundation and villa in Qatar which sadly was never completed. There are suggestions that it may yet be resurrected on another site. Let's hope so.
  
   We discussed how her views have been shaped over the years and I particularly liked this response: 'When somebody's a singer, there is music, there's a score, there's lyrics, there's that person's feelings, there's the place that they do it, you know when somebody sings a song? That instrument of the voice pulls all of these things together. And it's kind of interpretation and I think, maybe more like an installation artist, wherever you go you have your things that you bring to the table. I like curves, I like continuity, but things transform, I like things to be chameleon-like, changeable.'
  
   Apart from stretching her brain, psyche and talent in the hectic world of architecture I couldn't resist asking what else nourishes her. The answer was simple and immediate: food and language. Findlay spends many summers with friends in northern Italy and while she and her adult children love food and cooking, she is also learning Italian and increasingly more about Italian cooking. Her next culinary challenge was going to be a recipe from an Italian language cookbook for a cold sliced octopus carpaccio that starts with the bottling and setting of a whole octopus. I couldn't help but think it sounded like the perfect recipe for this extraordinary architect.
  
   I do wonder what art would grace our skylines if the bathrooms at Davos were unisex?