Medals
I’ll happily admit that when I first saw a photo of the Olympic medals for Paris, I said, “What are the dumb hexagons covering the gold?”
Because we live in an age of instant information (which is likely corroding our ability for deep focus, but another time...) I found my answer in a few clicks.
Today’s awards are directly connected to the French archives. Those dumb hexagons are slices of the ORIGINAL IRON from the Eiffel Tower. Whoa!
Incorporating elements other than gold, silver, or bronze is a modern medal trend — Albertville 1992, glass; Lillehammer 1994, granite; Beijing 2008, jade. Those all represented cultural connections, but none centered the archives so literally like Paris.
The shiny immediacy and 2024 joy juxtaposed with earthy, elemental iron shaped for the signature structure of the 1889 World’s Fair results in a fantastic new combination.
The success of this design reminds me of how the band OK Go talks about their process for sifting creative ideas to produce both wonder and surprise. The basic ideas are out there and available — just like archives — but the work is to align them in a way that’s both striking and original.
After the Eiffel Tower stunned audiences in 1889, the next iteration of the fair landed in Chicago in 1893. Americans struggled to conceive of an engineering feat that would impress visitors even more than the graceful French idol.
George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. delivered a monumental masterpiece. You might spot a descendant of that first Ferris Wheel at your county / state fair this time of year, especially in the Midwest. Those two-seat attractions are mini compared to the original that gently rotated more than 2,000 people high above the shores of Lake Michigan, claiming victory over the static spire in Europe.
Unfortunately, the wheel was scrapped after several years, so there will be no competitor to the incredible Olympic medal design, “sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.”
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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.