SWATCH®, the Official Timekeeper and Scorekeeper of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, announced today plans for its Olympic Pavilion, a unique structure to be located in Centennial Olympic Park. The Swatch Pavilion is designed by Peter Pfau from the San Francisco firm PFAU Architecture in collaboration with associate designers Bob Shepherd and David Yama from EYECANDY.
In a clearly brilliant stroke, the company that revolutionized the watch industry with plastic watches chose to cover its Olympic Pavilion with a plastic skin created from clear and semi-transparent polycarbonate sheet product. Just as the creation of the plastic Swatch watch combined technological superiority with artistic sensibility, so does the Swatch Olympic Pavilion.
"The building becomes a glowing jewel at night, transformed by different colored lights and images within the Pavilion skin," says the Design Team. All the while, still and video images of Olympic athletes are projected onto the Pavilion's outside walls. Perhaps what will most attract the 200,000 people expected to visit the Park each day during the 1996 Games is the ability to see the exciting activity taking place within the Pavilion.
"People will be drawn to the Pavilion by the same fascination they have for transparent watches; we see people or parts moving inside, just like operational parts of a Swatch watch," adds Mr. G. Nicolas Hayek, Vice-President of Marketing worldwide for Swatch.
Aerial crews flying overhead will see two giant Swatch watch faces in the landscape (and embedded in the floor of the Pavilion), but only visitors on the ground will have the opportunity to truly experience the Swatch Pavilion.
Pfau Architecture and Eyecandy designed the Pavilion as a cultural and entertainment oasis which will accommodate an average visitor flow of approximately 35,000 people a day, all of whom will be entertained on the queue line by viewing a conveyor belt display of the historical collection of every Swatch watch ever made -- almost 2,000 timepieces!
Upon entering the Pavilion, visitors will experience the universal emotion of a "moment of victory" -- not through staid presentations, but through interactive, provocative and playful exhibits. In the "Sound Tunnel" participants create their own rhythms by bumping against electronic touch pads, the timing device used to measure swimmers' times.
Visitors will also have the opportunity to see SWATCH Timing's HawkEye camera in action, either through solo exploration or through Group Timing Experiences, in which participants race each other across the finish line and see the exciting visual results as captured by Scan'O'Vision technology.
World-renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz will have a constant presence in the Swatch Pavilion during the Games, as her studio is located in the Pavilion's mezzanine level. "An Olympic Portfolio", her year-long project photographing U.S. athletes as they aspire to the Olympic Games, will be displayed as a photo collage along one wall. A second wall identified as a "work in progress" will display photographs taken during the Games.
The Pavilion will also offer displays of current watch collections, and if visitors are completely enticed, they may join the The Club, the official Swatch collectors club with over 100,000 members worldwide.
"This spirit and joy of life component of the Swatch message ties naturally to the energy and excitement of the moment generated constantly at the Olympic Games," says the Design Team, "most importantly the experience of the Pavilion is fun."
Mobile watch display islands, made of the same material as the Pavilion, will enhance the retail area that will be stocked with watches in giant dispensers which are visually entertaining to the public and logistically practical to the sales force.
And in their traditional media friendly fashion, a Swatch "Press Booth" is available at the Pavilion to provide media assistance, press materials and the scheduling of interviews.
SWATCH, is a division of the SMH Group Inc. (Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking Industries, Ltd.) the largest watch manufacturing group in the world. SMH brands have timed 25 previous Olympic Games and over 150 international and world-class sporting events. Their experience in the difficult tasks of measuring hundreths and thousandths of a second is unparalleled.
| More tickets were sold to the competitions of the 1996 Games than to any other Olympic Games or sports event in history. The 8.6 million ticket sales figures topped sales to the Los Angeles and Barcelona Games combined. |