I noticed, following the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, that most people were talking about just three moments – Mr Bean playing the “Chariots of Fire” music, the Queen and Mr Bond, and the lighting of the cauldron.So, inspired by the latter, I went on Friday to the Heatherwick Studio exhibition currently running at the V&A. I wanted to know more about this extraordinary creation and the design team behind it.
In some ways the show itself was frustrating – lots of small and intricate scale models demonstrating the ways the creative team had approached each task. It left me rather desperate to get out and see the real things in their natural habitats, spread as they are around the world. Perhaps closest to home is their extraordinary new Routemaster bus in London.
But the cauldron itself: how did it work?
Of course the first question for those of us watching on television was: where is it? It was nowhere to be seen. Except that there were clues in the copper petals that each country brought with them like gifts into the stadium, each petal contributing, it turned out, to the final construction.
The petals each plugged, like lightbulbs into sockets, at the end of slender stems, through which the gas, natural gas of course, coursed. And at the base of each stem was a pivot mechanism, so that they could each rise hydraulically, a process aided presumably by the heat from the flames.
Altogether, it strikes me as a paradoxical miracle of simplicity and complexity. A work of art created by design engineers. In a way, it’s exactly the kind of brilliant solution that drove the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
In case you’d like to re-capture the moment, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxRNN6uprZQ
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