A Festive Moment, Not an Epic

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Two Americans create a bright, breezy look for the Olympics

If there were a special gold medal for creative ingenuity, the U.S. Olympic design team should win it.

With limited time and scant money, it transformed a scattered, dowdy assortment of obsolete and makeshift facilities into a unified, colorful and festive setting for the Los Angeles Games. And all without major investment in new buildings. "Even the simplest new structures would have cost at least $500 million," says Ed Keen, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee's construction boss. "We couldn't afford such white elephants. So we decided to adapt 26 old athletic facilities--some left over from the 1932 Olympiad--and decorate them to give them a unified look.

That, and a new swimming pool and velodrome, cost only $95 million."

Instead of monumental stone and steel, the design features banners, bunting and balloons fluttering in the wind, lightweight fantasy structures jutting into the sky, odd-shaped cardboard-and-fabric tents sheltering the crowds. What first strikes the eye is the color scheme created by Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer in charge of all the Olympic imagery. Says Sussman: "The palette consists of unexpected, stimulating juxtapositions that instantly separate the Olympic pageantry from the everyday environment, the drabness of permanent institutions, industries, streets--hot magenta, vermilion and chrome yellow, set off by aqua. They are Mediterranean colors but also suggest Mexican markets, mariachi, Los Angeles and the Pacific Rim."

The colors are splashed over a sort of kit of parts devised by Supervising Architect Jon Jerde: structural elements have been combined in various ways to mark entrances, for example, or to form information booths and food stands. Among the most striking are striped cardboard columns known as Sonotubes and normally used in making concrete forms, which give stature to rented tents, support cloth pyramids, and generally lend settings color, shape and order. Rented steel scaffolding has been bolted into lighthearted, ephemeral structures from which fabric waves. Thin, tubular balloons, some hundreds of feet long, sway in the air like giant streamers. Chain-link fences, essential for security, wear miles of fabric blazoned with Sussman's colors in stars and bars, as well as a special confetti pattern.

The idea for a consistent graphic and environmental design came only as an afterthought. Early in 1982, as Architect Jerde, 44, worked on converting the UCLA dormitories into temporary housing for Olympic athletes, he realized that even temporary changes would be highly visible evidence of the Olympic presence. The organizing committee agreed to coordinate this visibility and turned the job over to Jerde's firm, The Jerde Partnership, which specializes in creating an urban ambience for shopping centers and commercial districts. Jerde in turn recruited Designer Sussman, 53, a former art director in the office of Charles and Ray Eames, who now has her own firm with her husband Paul Prejza. Says L.A.O.O.C. General Manager Harry L. Usher: "We wanted to get away from the trivial, and yet not get solemnly hooked into red, white and blue.

This is an international event. It should be fun. It should be pluralistic and yet convey a sense of wholeness."

Because stars and stripes remain among its many symbols, Jerde and Suss man call their effervescent design Festive Federalism. But it is much more. It is a rich synthesis of 20th century art, from Mird's squiggles and Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-woogie to Charles Eames' playfulness and Sister Mary Corita's sense of celebration, brought together, as Jerde puts it, "to express a moment rather than memorialize an epic."

Jerde and Sussman's strategy may also turn out to be Los Angeles' most important contribution to future Olympics.

With the number of participating nations increasing from 13 at the first modern Games in 1896 at Athens to 140 now at Los Angeles, even without the Soviet bloc, no host city will be able to afford permanent new architecture to accommodate the growing crowds for just two weeks.

Pompous white elephants will scarcely be missed if they are replaced by temporary improvisation as imaginative as Jerde and Sussman's.

-- By Wolf Von Eckardt