Kengo Kuma's Tokyo Olympic Stadium breaks ground

2016-12-13T17:29:00-05:00

Tokyo has held a groundbreaking ceremony for a $1.5bn (£1.2bn) national stadium that will host the 2020 Olympic Games. The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, and other dignitaries attended the event on Sunday at the site of the demolished national stadium that was used during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. [...] The ceremony ended with a video showing how the stadium is expected to look and function once completed by November 2019.

A quick refresher, here are just a few instances of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium saga in the Archinect news:

Zaha's Tokyo Olympic Stadium cancelled – Abe calls for a redesign from scratch

2015-07-17T12:59:00-04:00

After multiple reassurances that Zaha Hadid Architect's design for the Tokyo Olympic Stadium would continue, despite skyrocketing costs since its 2012 announcement and constantly decreasing public favor, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced today that the stadium would be scratched in favor of a complete redesign. The stadium, which was most recently estimated to cost ¥252 billion, had become more and more expensive due to rising construction costs in Japan, NHK World reports.

Zaha Hadid Architects issued a statement on their website responding to the decision, stating that the rising costs were not due to the design per-se, and that the real difficulty was agreeing on an acceptable construction cost. The statement expressed confidence, based on past major stadium experience (such as for the 2012 London Olympic Games), that ZHA could reliably build their design in a cost-effective manner. Public opinion in Japan was not enamored with the design – it had even spawned a satiric...

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Kengo Kuma's Tokyo Olympic Stadium breaks ground

Zaha's Tokyo Olympic Stadium cancelled – Abe calls for a redesign from scratch