What is the significance of the copper kettle at the olympics

How could the organisers of the London Olympics beat this? The first Olympic cauldron of the modern games appeared at the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam in — it appeared at the top of a tower Credit: Getty Images. The result was an Olympic cauldron unlike any other.

Two hundred and four copper plates shaped like petals, one for each of the competing nations, rose from the horizontal when the flame was lit by seven young athletes to form a stylised burning bush low down in the London stadium. Although complex, the Heatherwick cauldron resolved into a haunting, elemental spectacle capturing something of the near sacred spirit of the Olympic flame as it had first been imagined.

The Olympic Games, held in Olympia, Greece, from the8th Century BC to the 4th Century AD, were revived in when the opening ceremony was held in the Panathenaic Stadium, Athens, newly renovated by the architect Anastasios Metaxas, who, trained in Dresden, went on to win silver and bronze Olympic medals for shooting. The German connection was to be highly significant. Although the Olympic flame first blazed from a cauldron in Amsterdam in , it was Hitler and his colleagues who transformed the lighting ceremony into the stuff of cultural sorcery.

Several months before the opening of the Berlin games, an actress standing in for a Greek priestess lit the flame among the ruins of the Temple of Hera in Olympia. She did this using the rays of the sun reflected from a Zeiss parabolic mirror. The magnesium-burning Krupp torch was then taken up by the first of some three thousand runners. The last in the chain was Fritz Schilgen, an electrical engineer, who, chosen and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her epic documentary Olympia ran into a swastika-lined and sieg-heiling Olympiastadion where he ignited the simple if monumental cauldron that can still be seen there today.

The relay of the Olympic flame from Olympia, Greece, to the host city began in — Hitler wanted to use the games to connect his Reich with ancient might Credit: Getty Images. Due for completion in , this was to be home for all future Olympic games. Following a German victory in World War Two, all nations would send their athletes to Berlin for at least the next 1, years. As it turns out, St Moritz, Switzerland, hosted the first post-war winter Olympics in January with the summer Olympics following in London.

The London cauldron was little different from its German predecessor. It was only in the Helsinki Olympics that a modern, yet elemental, cauldron made its debut. Here, Paavo Nurmi, the legendary Finnish long distance runner, ignited a simple bowl supported on five slender legs. One of the most memorable moments in Olympic history was when an archer fired a flaming arrow into the cauldron, or so it seemed, at the games Credit: Getty Images.

Since then, perhaps the most successful Olympic cauldrons have been simple and restrained, reflecting the taut, lithe nature of athletics and the timeless appeal of these games. Tokyo featured a simple cauldron shaped like an upturned bell from a Shinto shrine in Montreal showed a minimalist steel bowl on the slimmest steel pole in , and, while more ambitious in formal design terms, the tall cauldron of the Olympics in Turin, resembling a cross between an industrial chimney and a Jewish havdalah candle, was fundamentally simple, too.

The momentum, though, remains in favour of circus-like spectacle. Visual restraint is not the order of the 21st Century Olympic day. There have, however, been moments when the bearer of the flame has outshone the most ambitious Olympic cauldron. Muhammad Ali, who won a gold medal for boxing in the Rome Olympics, lit the flame at the Atlanta games.

Once all the petals were ablaze the pipes rose them upwards to combine as one. The Olympic Torch designed by Hackney studio BarberOsgerby was unveiled last year and has been touring the UK since 19 May as part of the Olympic relay but the design of Heatherwick's cauldron was a closely guarded secret until tonight. Dezeen Weekly is a curated newsletter that is sent every Thursday, containing highlights from Dezeen.

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