Art Director for the official Norwegian Hospitality Lounge at the Winter Olympics in 2014.

The Winter Olympics is a big deal in Norway, and the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia was particularly significant because it was going to kick off Norway’s bidding campaign for the 2022 games (Norway ended up pulling it’s application one year later because of public opposition in the host city Oslo). 

The Norwegian Olympic Committee decided to build a hospitality lounge in the “inner circle” of structures that surrounded the main arena in Sochi. Given the ambitions of the committee as it was looking to a possible win for 2022, the NOC had a dense program scheduled for the lounge, with dignitaries' receptions, cultural events, press conferences as well as more political, closed doors agendas. Gyro was invited to design the lounge and I was asked to lead the creative team. 

The structure was a hollowed out office building, where we were not even allowed to drill holes in the walls, so we built a shell inside of the space NOC had rented. I designed wall graphics - large canvases on floor-to-ceiling stretchers, and asymetrical panels around columns - based on the official Norwegian Olympic Committee’s design profile, creating angular, crystalline bursts of photo collages, leaving white spaces for a number of flat-screen TVs. 

I worked with architect Luca Roncoroni for the layout of the space, and all technical relays with the construction crew on site. I worked with graphic designer Cathrine Årving on printed matter like menus, napkins, business cards, etc, and I worked with renowned architecture firm Snøhetta on an embedded stand featuring the Oslo 2022 bid - for which they had developed the design - and I adapted the design package of Youth Olympics in Lillehammer in 2016 into the scheme.

It was a fairly small space into which the NOC wanted to pack a long list of functions and contributors, so the key task was to create a design that would be strong enough to still frame and hold all the different elements.

All furniture, carpeting and lighting was chosen from very limited catalogues provided by the general contractor for the Sochi games.