The Olympic Cityscape Program

On Nov. 14, 2001, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games revealed chosen images for the 12 large-scale banners to be hung on 11 of Salt Lake City’s downtown buildings and one at the University of Utah.

Slated to be installed by Jan. 15, the cityscape building wraps will illuminate Salt Lake’s downtown skyline with powerful images of athletes participating in various winter sports, including hockey, snowboarding, curling, figure skating, speed skating, cross-country skiing, the biathlon, bobsledding and luge.

"The cityscape building wraps will be the initial Salt Lake 2002 Games-look elements to appear in the downtown area," said Mitt Romney, SLOC president and CEO. "We are implementing a first in Olympic history when unveiling a building banner project of this magnitude. The most powerful examples of our theme, ‘Light the Fire Within,’ are the athletes, which makes them appropriate subjects for this project." Romney emphasizes the banners capture the ethnic diversity of the athletes.

Iconic symbols of the 2002 Winter Games will be used extensively in the design program. Acclaimed photographer John Huet captured the athletes’ images for the cityscape project. Huet has also contracted to photograph the Games themselves.

Gold-medal banners

The SLOC contracted with numerous community partners to hang the downtown banners. Further, SLOC contracted with other buildings not to display conflicting commercial banners. ProGrafix International (Layton, UT) is producing the cityscape building wraps, while Salt Lake City-based Young Electric Sign Co. (YESCO) is installing them.

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On the morning of the banner announcement, YESCO began the process on the Key Bank building by removing individual letters to make room for the huge banners. After the Olympic and Paralympic Games’ large-scale wraps are removed, newly manufactured "Key Bank" letters will be installed.

Jeff Young, YESCO’s Salt Lake Div. manager, said the project will require more than 12,000 hours to install, remove and remediate the buildings. "As far as we know," Young says, "it is the largest, single building-wrap package in the world. Every building uses a specific attachment method, and all of them are stamped with a structural engineer’s stamp."

More than 500,000 watts of lighting will grace these buildings. Designed by lighting designer Ted Maestas, the lighting will be provided and installed by YESCO.

The banners feature a netting effect: The window and wall treatments allow light to pass through, but from a distance, they appear opaque. Each banner will weigh between one and two tons, but the fastener systems and adhesives will leave minimal residual markings on the buildings.

Wayne C. Boydstrum, president of ProGrafix, said, "The story is not only about the printing, it’s about the entire fabrication of the banners, according to YESCO’s engineering specification, and the attachment of the banners to the buildings."

The largest banner — 339 ft. tall by 158 ft. wide — is equivalent to 80 billboards. After it is printed and sewn in 30 pieces to fit the building and engineering specifications, it will be installed in three vertical, 339-ft. sections.

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ProGrafix is printing the banners on |2324|’s (Meredith, NH) 5300 and 3300 grand-format, piezo-inkjet printers using Duracote (Ravenna, OH) mesh material. The banners are engineered to withstand a 70-mph wind as required by the Salt Lake City building code.

Standards to meet

The SLOC’s director for the Look of the Games, Robert Finley, says the SLOC standards manual, which controls the icon sizes, fonts and colors, includes 19 pictograms that are used for wayfinding. For each Olympics, the IOC requires a custom set angled at 30