Heritage Landscapes vol.47
Heritage Landscapes is the Promemoria Group newsletter created to observe the contemporary heritage landscape. Twice a month we share the most interesting news and the most innovative projects, investigating those archival stories that turn an object, a brand or an insight, into a legend.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
Between architecture, design, fashion, food, technology. With no limit to our curiosity.
1. The Long View
The Olympic Design
The Olympic Design is a platform born out of passion: to tell the story of how the Olympic Games have built their image, edition after edition. An editorial space designed not only to study and document everything related to aesthetics and art, but also to share it free of charge with enthusiasts or those who, until now, could not even imagine the existence of such a carefully researched and organized collection.
Perhaps you remember the pictograms of Lillehammer 1994, or the Look of the Games of Athens 2004.
Perhaps you remember the minimalist logo of Tokyo 1964, or the graphic explosion of Mexico City 1968. Each Olympics has its own personality, shaped by the culture, history, and politics of the host country, and the design thus becomes a symptom of its characteristics.
260 designers, over 6,500 images, and thousands of hours of research: this website, based on two printed volumes covering 58 Olympic Games from 1896 to the present day, has been transformed into a living archive that helps users navigate symbols, logos, pictograms, and visual languages, avoiding errors and simplifications, because Olympic design is not just graphics, but a story worth telling.
Perhaps you remember the minimalist logo of Tokyo 1964, or the graphic explosion of Mexico City 1968. Each Olympics has its own personality, shaped by the culture, history, and politics of the host country, and the design thus becomes a symptom of its characteristics.
260 designers, over 6,500 images, and thousands of hours of research: this website, based on two printed volumes covering 58 Olympic Games from 1896 to the present day, has been transformed into a living archive that helps users navigate symbols, logos, pictograms, and visual languages, avoiding errors and simplifications, because Olympic design is not just graphics, but a story worth telling.
2. Augmented Craft
An experiment that uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct the past of 33 iconic sites, combining historically inspired footage and contemporary visions: Route 66: Rewind allows us to travel along the legendary Route 66. Thanks to Google Arts & Culture, in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, photographs, archival materials, and testimonies from local communities interact with technology, breathing new life into emblematic places and allowing us to experience a true educational adventure.
3. Seen & Noted
The Olympic Games™. A three-thousand-year history. is the exhibition presented at the Luigi Rovati Foundation on the occasion of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games; an exhibition that creates a dialogue between the ancient and contemporary worlds, produced in collaboration with the Olympic Museum and the Musée cantonal d'archéologie et d'histoire in Lausanne. The initiative is part of the Cultural Olympics program, combining art, heritage, and sport in full respect of the Olympic ideal.
Credits: The Olympic Design, Google Arts & Culture, Fondazione Luigi Rovati.
“Time from the past to the future is certainly a straight line, as a concept. So, we think that imagination works the same way. Instead, very often we go back to retrieve ideas that may have been forgotten from the past, and they reappear with unexpected variations, variations due to the fact that we have had to learn something in the meantime.”
- Federico Faggin, physicist, inventor, entrepreneur, author, and speaker at Legend25
- Federico Faggin, physicist, inventor, entrepreneur, author, and speaker at Legend25