Designs shortlisted for Tokyo Olympic stadium

Toyo Ito and Kengo Kuma are said to have been shortlisted in the competition to find a replacement for Zaha Hadid’s scrapped design for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic stadium.

Images of their proposals, which both promise to be cheaper and smaller than the Hadid design, have only been identified as “design A” and “design B” but the two architects were widely named by local media.

Design A is 50m tall and features wood latticework and a flat roof. Design B is 54m with glass walls. Both are much lower than the 70m of the ZHA design.

The two will be put out to public consultation and then be voted on by a jury. A winner will be picked for cabinet approval by the end of the year.

Both teams say work would be complete by the end of November 2019, a month before the January 2020 deadline requested by the International Olympic Committee. The stadium was originally supposed to host the 2019 rugby world cup as well.

The designs were released by the Japan Sport Council on behalf of the government, which said they would cost around £815 million, significantly less than ZHA’s $1.3 billion. Japanese sports minister Hakubun Shimomura later predicted this would spiral to $3 billion - “too massive a budget”.

Ito and Kuma were among the leading Japanese architects, along with Fumihiko Maki and Sou Fujimoto, who criticised the ZHA scheme for its expense and complexity. This, plus a march by 500 protestors, forced the practice to revise the scheme. But eventually political pressure led to its abandonment in July.

ZHA originally won the competition in 2012 against an international shortlist that included Toyo Ito & Associates, Sanaa and Populous.