Fashioning Performance Attire Attire for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

This timely workshop offers Columbia architecture students a unique opportunity to participate in a spectacular global event by working on the design of the costumes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony to be presented on August 8th, 2008 (8/8/8) at 8PM in the 'Bird's Nest' Olympic Stadium designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Under the Opening Ceremony's design team of film director and chief, Zhang Yimou; set designer, Mark Fisher; special effects artist, Cai Guo-Qjang; and adviser; Steven Spielberg among others, the program, design, and production milestones of the class will be established by the event's costume director, Eiko Ishioka.

Reflecting the celebratory spirit of the Olympics' and Beijing 2008's three main themes: Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics, and People's Olympics; the class's design work is intended to support the needs and of the 45-minute choreographed performance and investigate the human body's most intimate architecture and future potential of its clothed form.

Dynamically alternating between phases of research, design, critique, and production, the outfitted presence of the ceremony's cast and crew will be developed and detailed head-to-toe to service the physical and dramatic spectacle. Paramount are the wardrobes' physical and visual amplification as live and televised performances from the grand size of the stadium to intimate scale of the bodies up close will be considered. The course will serve as a platform for discussion, testing, and speculation between future technology, human needs, the global environment, and beyond.

This course will be run parallel to the Japan Lab for Architecture and Culture.

This course is limited to 4-5 students.