Selected to design the future torch and cauldron for the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024, French designer Mathieu Lehanneur believes that design is a sphere of endless opportunities
To put himself through university, French designer Mathieu Lehanneur was briefly a medical guinea pig for pharmaceutical labs, testing drugs before they went to market. This experience aligned with Lehanneur’s curious spirit and his interest in creating hybrid products inspired by science and technology. For his graduation project at ENSCI - Les Ateliers (French National Institute for Advanced Studies in Industrial Design), he created a set of 10 playful devices for delivering the exact dose and involving patients in their treatment so that they become actors in their own healing. It went on to enter MoMA New York’s permanent collection five years later.
“It was a new way of conceiving and designing medicines,” he recalls. “I like the way science aims to understand human beings in their great complexity. I love how our body alters our psychological states and how our mind affects our physical states. Science, whether astrophysical, biological or medical, is the greatest source of knowledge and a permanent inspiration for my work.”
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Harbouring a deep-seated desire to question the interactions between human beings and their environment, the revolutionary Andrea air purifier that’s a living filter absorbing toxic compounds from the air. Made in collaboration with David Edwards, a Harvard professor of biomedical engineering, the air purifier stems from his interest in astronauts’ unhealthy living conditions in space. Harnessing the natural power of plants to regenerate the atmosphere of our interiors, it’s a miniature mobile greenhouse that he labels “the perfect combination of science, nature and design”.
Now Lehanneur has won the contest to design the torches and cauldrons of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics next year, which will be identical for both Games for the first time ever. It is a big honour for the designer to craft the symbol of the values and spirit of the Games; the beacons will be relayed by 11,000 torchbearers to every region of France.
The designer has conceived the torch carrying the Olympic Flame based on three main pillars: equality, water and peacefulness. The torch is perfectly symmetrical, reflecting the absolute parity of male and female athletes, and plays with the ripples and reflections of polished steel that has become visually liquid echoing the Seine River as the beating heart of Paris and the Games, and features subtle curves referencing the flame as a message of peace.