Holy cow, Japan’s war of cartoons against their $2 billion Olympic stadium actually worked:
Three years after Japanese Olympic organizers selected a vast, sleek stadium design by a prominent Iraqi-British architect for the centerpiece venue of the 2020 Summer Games, the government announced on Friday that it would scrap the plan and start over because of spiraling costs…
“The current plan will go back to being a blank sheet of paper, and we will rethink it from scratch,” [prime minister Shinzo] Abe said at a news conference.
This just two days after Abe said there was no way he was going to change the design, because there’s only five years left before the 2020 Summer Olympics, and that’s too short a time to come up with something cheaper, somehow? But that was before this:
The new plan is, well, a blank piece of paper, so no one knows what it will look like or how much it will cost. Reuters reports that Abe “made no mention of costs and whether this meant another competition for a design, or if another design from a 2012 competition would be used.”
Anyway, this kind of thing happens from time to time — the Brooklyn Nets were originally going to have an arena designed by Frank Gehry, recall, until it turned out to be too crazy expensive and featured an office building next door that looked like a stack of post-apocalyptic milk crates. The hope is that Japan can now come up with something both cheaper and less ugly, though the precedent here isn’t exactly promising.
“The decision, announced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, came in response to growing public anger over the stadium’s estimated cost”
Wow, a government actually giving a damn about what its citizens have to say…
Anyways, good for the homeland. Much better ways to use $2 billion than to build the world’s biggest bike helmet in the middle of Tokyo.
There should be some kind of “off the rack” budget stadium choice. All it needs is benches for 80,000 people, 8 lanes of squishy asphalt in an oval shape, and trucks to haul it away after the olympics.
Blank sheet of paper? At the very least they have something wipe with.
And there is this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/world/asia/japans-lower-house-passes-bills-giving-military-freer-hand-to-fight.html?_r=0
Could both events be related?
In any case, the true problem of Olympic committees is to throw cash at problems. We are talking about a $5-7 billion dollar stadium after this is complete.
The whole “let’s compare stadiums and arenas to toilets” trend is idiotic. This thing looks absolutely nothing like a toilet.
It looks like a bicycle helmet which is not much better. You would think for $2 billion they could come up with something better.
Maybe they should just renovate Tokyo Dome. It’s primarily used as a baseball stadium, but it’s also been used as a track stadium. Move the stands around. Be the example of a fiscally and ecologically responsible Olympic site by reusing preexisting stadiums and not building billion dollar stadiums that don’t have a useful purpose after the Games leave. If the IOC doesn’t like it, they can take it elsewhere!
@Sam They’re replacing the National Olympic Stadium (1958), which according to Wikipedia “official capacity was 57,363, but the real capacity was only 48,000 seats,” which is slightly larger then the dome, and one of the “problems” is that it doesn’t seat enough people.
Honestly replacing the national stadium built in 1958 isn’t all that a bad idea (and by looking at it, I can see easy, non-crazy reasons why a more modern stadium makes sense), unless you’re just against stadiums from public tax dollars in every circumstance, just the one they were going to build was a terrible idea in cost and design.
And National Stadium didn’t have to be replaced. All they really had to do was build another deck of stand as well as suites. This would have required planners to create another outer wall to support the stands though it isn’t like the renovations to LA Coliseum prior to the 1984 Olympics and more like the changes to Yankee Stadium from late 1973 to early 1976.