When Selfridge's (the London Dept. store ) opened in 1909 it displayed the Bleriot XI, the first airplane to cross the English Channel from Dover to Calais, ushering in an era of glamorous association between travel, technology and luxury goods. The Concorde brought this era to its pinnacle, and its grounding and removal from service also brought the era to a close.The fastest commercial plane ever engineered couldn't keep up with political and economic changes that made it untenable to operate, relegating it to the status of technological dinosaur for use only in museums and books.
Olympus is a celebration of the tremendous technological feat of Concorde and also a eulogy for the elegance and aspirations that died with it.
Using a maintenance manual purchased on Ebay for £6 (12$) and a lot of styrofoam, paper and glue, designers PostlerFerguson engage in a bit of recent-past archaeology to construct a full-scale model of the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 jet engine from the Concorde.
Taking the form of an abstracted, three-dimensional technical drawing, it balances the beautiful technical perfection of the engine against the distance between today's budget-airline reality and the era of technological optimism it comes from.
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