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The Observer

Tokyo’s Olympic architecture: look, no Bird’s

Nest…

Rowan Moore
Sun 18 Jul 2021 12.00 BST

W
hat if the Olympics were upstaged by a cat? It’s a real danger.
Considerable interest has recently been generated by a 3D-animated
giant calico creature that mews and wiggles from a newly installed
billboard at passengers coming and going from Tokyo’s Shinjuku
station. It’s hard to detect similar excitement about the architectural offering at the
city’s Olympic Games, which are due to open a year late on 23 July.
Nor is it likely to match the impact of the city’s last Olympics in 1964. This was,
according to the New York Times, “a debutante ball for democratic postwar Japan”,
one that “crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an
ultramodern megalopolis”. It was a festival of construction and design as well as
sport: not just the striking Olympic facilities, but also the elevated highways that
made Tokyo into the law-abiding version of Blade Runner that it is today – and the
first of Japan’s famous bullet trains.

The Games’ architectural star was the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, originally
designed by Kenzo Tange for swimming and diving, a swooping marvel of
cantilevers and hanging roofs and hovering concrete. If it were built now, it would
still get it described as “futuristic”. It gave new form and energy to the concept of
high-object Olympic architecture, and other cities would follow: Munich in 1972
brought another floating, swooping object – a tent-like stadium by the architect-
engineer Frei Otto; Beijing 2008 had its Bird’s Nest; London 2012 had its Zaha Hadid-
designed Aquatics Centre.

In general, old Tokyo 2020 is at some risk of being the saddest Olympics
tropes of Olympic ever. The state of the pandemic means that the athletes
hopefulness are will be performing to mostly empty venues, which will
trotted out. Walls at least spare spectators the sometimes atrocious heat
slope, roofs curve, and humidity of midsummer Japan. The quadrennial
structures hover theatre of ballooning Olympic budgets has reached new
levels; some estimates put it at £18.75bn, up from an
original budget of £5.26bn. In a recent poll, 83% of
Japanese people said they wanted it postponed or cancelled.

That same pandemic makes it tricky to see the new venues in the flesh, but from a
distance of 6,000 miles they mostly look ho-hum and stodgy, corporate, lacking in
spark. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow, one of Japan’s livelier practices,
has objected that “we independent artists are banned and totally deleted from the
list of the designers. They want a big firm, a corporate firm to work with a
construction company. There’s no chance for independent architects.”
 ‘A swooping marvel’: Kenzo Tange’s 1964 Yoyogi National Stadium, repurposed venue for Tokyo 2020’s handball,
badminton and wheelchair rugby. Photograph: Tokyo 2020 organisation/AFP/Getty Images

Wherever that colossal expenditure went, it doesn’t seem to have gone into
architectural invention. But there could yet be a silver lining – Tokyo 2020 might
represent a welcome shift, if it means that the Olympics are finally weaning
themselves off extravagant architectural trophies. Tange and Otto and the like have
given the world some glorious moments, but it is surely time, nearly 60 years later,
to find other ways of achieving architectural beauty.

On top of the podium for drab design is the Olympic Village, an ensemble of generic
global apartment blocks, grey and gridded, microscopically enlivened by a few
curvy, ribbon-like balustrades, with an all-timber, recyclable Village Plaza – a hub
for the athletes with a general store, cafe and media centre. Its larch, cedar and
cypress have been sourced from 63 municipalities across Japan, to which it will be
returned, such that it can be used for “public benches or parts of school buildings”,
as the official blurb puts it. This is fine, as far is it goes, but it looks distinctly
tokenistic next to the vast conventional blocks around it.
 Tokyo’s Olympic Village: ‘top of the podium for drab design’. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

The best-looking new building is the 68,000-seat Japan National Stadium. It is

designed by Kengo Kuma, the architect best known in Britain for his V&A museum
in Dundee, who won the Tokyo commission when the price tag for a more ambitious
design by Zaha Hadid Architects rose past £1.3bn, and was scrapped. Kuma’s
version, still costing a not-small £1.2bn, is described as a “living tree”. It uses plenty
of timber in its construction and is ringed with prominent horizontals, which are
said to evoke the overhanging eaves of traditional Japanese buildings. It’s not
radical or groundbreaking and there’s some awkwardness in the way its different
parts go together, but it does achieve an overall handsomeness.

Otherwise, there is the partly timber Ariake Gymnastics Centre, a reasonably

competent essay in overhanging curviness of a kind familiar from previous
Olympics. The Aquatics Centre, credited to Yamashita Sekkei and Kenzo Tange’s
son, Paul Noritaka Tange, is an inverted part-pyramid with repeating rhythms of
sloping slats that looks something like a 1960s embassy in a tropical country, or a
library in a midwestern US university. The Ariake Arena (volleyball and Paralympic
basketball) is another inverted part-pyramid, this one with a concave roof, zestless
in execution. The Musashino Forest Sport Plaza (badminton, fencing and wheelchair
basketball) has an oddly warped and sliced vaulted roof, as if someone was trying to
emulate the Sydney Opera House but lost heart along the way.

In general, old tropes of Olympic hopefulness are trotted out. Walls slope, roofs
curve, structures hover, it being a never-ending image of progress to suggest that in
the future gravity will act in a different way. Flimsy references are made to
traditional Japanese architecture. New nods to sustainability are added to the old
repertoire, in particular a vogueish use of timber. Much of the character of these
buildings is determined by the fact that they are delivered by Japan’s powerful
construction companies, to whom architects must play second fiddle. The
contractors tend to have the final say on details, which as a result get the life
squeezed out of them.

‘As if someone was trying to emulate Sydney Opera House but lost heart’: Musashino Forest Sport Plaza, Tokyo, Japan.
Photograph: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images

The cancellation of the previous stadium design means that there’s a Hadid-shaped
hole when it comes to architectural spectacle. Kenzo Tange’s Yoyogi building,
repurposed for Tokyo 2020 for handball and Paralympic badminton and rugby, will
still be the Games’ most compelling work of architecture, 57 years on. But here lies
the speck of hope. Brand new gestural architecture, like many things from 1964 –
those elevated highways for example – looks more questionable now than it did
then. Even if they had found the extra cash for the Hadid stadium, it would
essentially have been a reworking of the themes of curvaceous anti-gravity that
Tange explored all those years ago.

The world of construction is slowly waking up to the fact that, as the building of
new structures consumes a huge amount of energy and resources, there is a
powerful argument for re-using old ones whenever possible. It’s not a bad thing,
then, if the most powerful architectural icon of Tokyo 2020 is three years off getting
its free bus pass.

In fact, 34 of the 42 venues at these Olympics are older buildings reused, which is
welcome, even if a mystery remains as to where that vast budget went. Paris, host of
the 2024 Olympics, promises that 95% of its venues will be either existing or
temporary, and that “its carbon emissions will be halved in comparison to the last
two editions of the Summer Games”. The next task is to make refurbishment
enticing and delightful – it can be done – or the cat challenge posed by Tokyo 2020
will continue to be flunked.

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