Torching the Olympic image

From the start of its planning effort for this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, China has used architectural imagery to powerful effect. In hiring the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the main Olympic Stadium and London's Norman Foster to handle the international airport -- among other bold and expensive projects that will be unveiled this year -- leaders wagered that photographs of the new buildings would promote the notion of a modern, cosmopolitan China.

To a large degree, the strategy has worked. Even as politicians around the world have weighed boycotting the games to protest China's policies on Tibet and Darfur, magazines have churned out a steady series of glossy spreads on the new landmarks.

Unlike Athens, where last-minute work on Olympic venues four years ago suggested a slapdash Games, with a thin layer of sawdust seeming to coat the opening ceremonies, China's architectural class of 2008 has stood clearly for crisp planning and worldly ambition. However you felt about Beijing's human-rights record, you had to give the government credit for producing a tightly choreographed Olympic PR campaign with iconic architecture at its center.

Then came the Olympic torch relay.

Beginning in Greece, where security officials had to wrestle with protesters just before the torch was lighted -- among the picturesque ruins of a classical stadium in Olympia, no less -- its journey has been a political and logistical disaster for the Chinese.

Perhaps most damaging has been the steady stream of images produced by its chaotic international tour. In the space of two weeks, the most powerful and widely distributed of those images -- banners unfurled from the Golden Gate Bridge, a torch-bearer hiding inside a bus in Paris -- have managed to make a more forceful impression than the work of a dozen superstar architects.

Warehouse pit stop

Another bizarre episode came Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco, when the torch and its entourage took refuge for nearly half an hour inside a warehouse on Pier 48, along the city's waterfront. Local officials appeared to be debating whether to send it along its planned route down the Embarcadero, which was packed with protesters as well as flag-waving supporters of Beijing bused in by the Chinese consulate.