Fabric towers guide Olympic visitors

Each destination at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver featured a 40-foot wayfinding tower changing from red to white to blue, showing visitors the way to Cypress Mountain, Whistler Olympic Park, BC Place and nine other competition venues. The “Nordic combined” cross-border team landing the bid for the towers and 200 custom signs consisted of Rainier Industries Ltd., Seattle, Wash., and Sopers Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Each tower rose from a concrete base decorated with wood damaged by wood-boring beetles to provide unique texture. A steel frame and aluminum staple track for digitally printed fabric had to stand up to snow, rain, sleet, gloom-of-night and 100 mile-per-hour winds. Towers clad in 16-ounce Cooley 0606 white translucent (and recyclable) material showed off backlit graphics with LED lights cycling through different colors every two minutes. With minor alterations, the towers continued to light the way for visitors during the Paralympic games.