With just a couple days left before the International Olympic Committee names a host for the 2016 Summer Olympics, I thought it’d be interesting to check out the proposals from each of the four remaining contenders — Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. Today: Tokyo. Previous: Chicago, Madrid, Rio.
Designed by Kenji Ekuan of GK Design Group, Tokyo’s Olympic bid logo uses a traditional Japanese knot called a masubi to tie the five Olympic colors together in unity (slogan: “Uniting our worlds”). While I’m not all that into the overall design when compared with the other three proposals, I think it does a good job of being unique to the city. If they could have figured out how to create the appearance of a knot without so much gradient, I’d probably be more on board with it.
At this point, I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that these Olympic proposals are all about quantity rather than quality when it comes to the architectural renderings. I was really hoping that this series would be an interesting look at how to put together graphics and renderings for a proposal, but alas, it seems that most of the work was put into the logos (which for the most part, all turned out pretty well). The Olympic stadium above was the closest rendering I could find in the proposal that anything near a “wow factor” (FLOATING ROOF WOW). The rest are SketchUp-style, like the other three proposals, with very little left to the imagination. It’s almost as if the same person did the renderings for each of the proposals…
I’m still convinced that if one of them had broken from the prevailing trend of depicting things exactly how it could be and gone a little more toward the ambiguous end of things, they could have had an amazing proposal. Like I said before, a rendering that leaves the specifics to the imagination can do wonders for a proposal like this. It’s not like they don’t have six years to work on the details of this thing…
