Critics slam Japan’s shortlisted Olympic stadium designs

The two short-listed designs for the new national stadium that will serve as the centre-piece of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games have been lambasted as “boring,” while the winner of the original competition has been “shafted” and her vision “replaced by mediocre Japanese designs.”

The Japan Sport Council unveiled on Monday the two proposals for the national stadium, with a decision on the winning design to be announced before the end of December.

Riccardo Tossani, an Italian-Australian architect who has had a practice in Tokyo for more than two decades, said, “While the designs put forward by Zaha Hadid were of the 21st century and moving into the 22nd century, these two stadiums are of he 20th century regressing to the 19th century.

“Japan is taking backwards steps with its designs for a stadium that should be an icon for Tokyo for years to come,” he said.

Hadid’s design “captured all the qualities of Tokyo that architects and residents of this city find so timeless, breath-taking and appropriate,” he said.

“But these new projects pander to a nationalistic, juvenile view of what the politicians consider to be the Japanese vernacular,” he said.