This year’s Olympic torch was designed to disappear

An Olympic torch is a small, flaming time capsule.

Since the start of the modern Games in 1936, the torch has been passed by thousands of runners in a relay that goes from Olympia, Greece to the host city’s stadium. It’s a feat of engineering, since it needs to be durable enough to resist wind and rain, while keeping the Olympic flame arrive. But torch designers also imbue them with symbolic meaning.

The Berlin 1936 torch was engraved with the Nazi iconography of an eagle. The Sapporo 1972 torch was a thin, cylindrical combustion tube that was a marvel of Japanese engineering. The Rio 2016 torch featured rippling blue waves celebrating the country’s natural beauty.

What kind of torch represents the world we now live in? Carlo Ratti, the Italian architect and designer tasked with creating the torch for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, pondered this question for a long time. Ratti’s work largely explores the future of cities, particularly as global warming looms. For him, the biggest issues of our time are climate change and political polarization. Three years ago, he began the process of making a torch that captured these big ideas.

His torch is perhaps the most sustainable one we’ve seen. It is made of recycled materials and it is designed to be refilled, so it can be used up to 10 times. It is minimalist to a fault, meant to fade into the background so that the world focuses on the flame within it. The flame, he says, is a powerful symbol of our joint humanity.

“At this time of deep polarization and divisions,” he says, “we tried to strip down most of the things from the torch and really let the fire speak.” Fire, after all, predates every nation that now passes it along. “It’s one of the first technologies of mankind,” Ratti notes—something ancient, sacred, and shared long before borders existed.”

A Lineage of Torch Makers

Before sketching a single form, Ratti traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where every Olympic torch is preserved at the Olympic Museum. Seeing them in person, rather than online, made the pattern unmistakable.

“Everybody somehow tried to capture the moment of their time,” Ratti says. Each torch, he observed, follows the same basic logic: a burner at the core, wrapped in a designed shell meant to convey meaning. Like car design, he explains, the engine is hidden beneath an eye-catching exterior. “And then the second thing is capturing the moment—connecting with local motifs.”

Early torches, beginning with the relay introduced at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, leaned heavily on classical references. The London 1948 torch resembled a chalice, while the Rome 1960 torch was designed to look like a column.

Toward the end of the 20th century designs were more sculptural and declarative, often mirroring national ambition. The 1992 Albertville torch, designed by Philippe Starck, was in the shape of an elegant curve and was meant to reflect French modernism. The 1994 Lillehammer torch had a distinct Viking aesthetic.

In the 21st century, the emphasis shifted again to focus on technological innovation. The torch for Sydney 2000 famously combined fire and water. Beijing 2008 engineered its torch to survive the winds of Mount Everest.

A Radical Shift

Against that backdrop, Ratti’s instinct was to do something quietly radical: design the flame, not the torch.

That idea led to an inversion of the usual process. Rather than starting with an expressive exterior, Ratti and his team began with the burner itself, shaping only the minimum structure needed to hold and protect it. The result is the lightest Olympic torch ever produced—small, slender, and almost an afterthought in the runner’s hand. “We just start from the inside,” Ratti says, “and we do the minimal shape around the burner.”

The effect is intentional disappearance. In photographs, the torch nearly dissolves into its surroundings, reflecting sky, snow, or cityscape depending on where it’s carried. The runner and the flame take precedence; the object recedes. Ratti describes the earliest sketch as “a runner with a flame in her or his hand instead of the torch itself.”

There are a few earlier torch designers who had similar instincts. Ratti points to the torches designed by Japanese industrial designer Sori Yanagi for Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympics and Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics as key inspirations—both exercises in restraint. What has changed, he argues, is technology. Today, advances in aerodynamics, materials science, and fuel systems make it possible to minimize the object without compromising the flame.

That same logic extends to sustainability. Milano Cortina’s torch is not only smaller but engineered to be refilled and made largely from recycled aluminum. For Ratti, this approach is part of his broader philosophy. He argues that any designer working today must consider the environmental impact of their work.

This applies to his work as an architect, creating a floating plaza in the Amazon River where people can experience the impact of climate change to turning a former railyard in Italy into a logistics hub featuring a renewable energy plant. “The first step in order to adapt is to use less, to use less stuff,” he says.

Looking back at Olympic history is bittersweet. Earlier generations didn’t have to focus as much on sustainability because the climate hadn’t yet been so damaged. But today, it is impossible to design a torch without thinking of its environmental impact.

For Ratti, it was important to imbue the torch with a clear message because the passing of the torch is seen by millions—possibly billions—of viewers around the world. By designing a torch that fades into the background, Ratti is making the case that we should pull back on overconsumption and excess, and focus our energies instead how we can work together to keep thriving as a species. “Maybe humanity will lose interest in oversized ballrooms and gilded pastiche,” he says.