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Her accusation was about the essential underpinnings: the seating, sightlines, access points, infrastructure and placement of all those sushi and soba concessions. Hadid’s complaint was not about her shell, the most visible design element, in which she had abstracted a “calligraphy” of lines from the curving roads of the surrounding cityscape, and created pathways that would become public promenades over and through the building, as in a park. When Kuma’s plans were published, Hadid and her partner Patrik Schumacher publicly called out the similarities between the “bowl” beneath Kuma’s superstructure and their own. During a press conference, he lamely added in further defense of his winning design that the language barrier made it “perhaps difficult for architects from other countries to work in Japan.”
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Kuma reportedly contended that the Japanese would appreciate his scheme’s carefully crafted detail, yet that defense failed to acknowledge that most Olympic spectators will be watching on TV screens that can better capture a grand architectural gesture. (Green architecture sheds criticism more easily.) Some people in Japan immediately dubbed the design the “Big Mac,” with tufts of greenery stuck out between the stacked perimeter walkways like lettuce. Kuma’s oval design, with its flat roof, wood cladding, and sandwiched levels, represented a retreat from architectural dynamism into comfort nationalism, with a green halo. As Ando had originally commented on Hadid’s winning scheme: "The entry's dynamic and futuristic design embodies the messages Japan would like to convey to the rest of the world." Given the objections to Hadid’s bravura design, which leapt over the site as if in a track-and-field competition, Kuma’s design was modest (as was Ito’s), seemingly far short of Olympian aspiration.
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The new Kuma design was chosen in December 2015 (and completed in late November 2019, just as COVID was taking hold in China). The Japanese architects’ attack ballooned into a national issue when then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, deflecting attention from his low popularity ratings, renounced the design, stating that building a new stadium would have “to start over from zero.” The country’s largest newspaper headlined a story about a price tag reaching $2.1 billion, almost twice the original estimate, and other newspapers piled on about the costs of a building that had never been open to competitive bidding. Maki seemed to volunteer to take over, if asked: the petition he spearheaded sounded like a job application. Hadid called it hypocrisy, since some of the objecting architects had already accepted the brief by competing. Harvard-trained Fumihiko Maki maintained the competition had been conducted to favor famous, and therefore, foreign architects-even though Japan’s most celebrated architects joined the famous architect in protest. Rendering of Hadid's unrealized stadium at night, with its signature concrete keels. As it was, the new stadium would replace the existing 50,000-seat National Stadium on the site. They did not mention that the Olympic grounds are isolated within an enceinte of major roads, and that a busy freeway, rail lines and a half-kilometer-wide swath of dense Tokyo urban fabric separate the sports park from another park in which the Meijii Shrine is located.
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The implication was that only a Japanese architect would know how to embody the necessary spirit of the place. In an assault on the legitimacy of an international competition-whose jury was headed by one of Japan’s Pritzker laureates, Tadao Ando-those architects claimed, belatedly, that the site was sensitive because of its proximity to the hallowed Meiji Shrine, and that a smaller design should be built. The Japan Sport Council used that design in its bid to secure the 2020 Olympics.īut after Hadid spent two years perfecting it as a site-specific urban organism that could handle armies of spectators, a group of prominent Japanese architects started objecting. In 2012, out of the 45 proposals in an invited competition, Zaha Hadid won the commission for the new stadium, proposing a lithe, athletic building: concrete keels, the structure’s signature, arched over the playing field to support a retractable roof.