Nendo

It’s not every day a creative is given carte blanche to ‘design flames’ – yet this was one key task among many which Oki Sato of Nendo found himself tackling recently. These were admittedly no ordinary flames: they were created to flicker at the heart of the Olympic cauldron, designed by Nendo for this year’s belated summer games in Tokyo. Inspired by the sun, the white orb blossomed into ten reflective aluminium panels beneath the night sky, opening like the petals of a flower before being lit by tennis player Naomi Osaka.

The lighting of the cauldron was not only the final chapter in a painstaking design journey (a two-year process involving no fewer than 85 prototypes, combined with multiple pandemic challenges). It also marked the apex of Nendo’s consistently upward trajectory since a freshly graduated Sato and four friends launched the design firm in 2002, in his parents’ garage in Tokyo.

Over the next two decades, the studio’s prolific output has been true to its name – means clay in Japanese. Its ever-busy team (today totalling around 60, in Tokyo, Milan and Shanghai) are behind a malleable catalogue of projects nimbly spanning the creative spectrum, from homes and restaurants to furniture and products, with no detail of daily