ZAHA HADID’S CONTROVERSIAL design for Japan’s 2020 Olympics is history. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pointed to the swelling cost—over $2 billion—as the reason his government would “start over from zero.”
Hadid has been under fire for her sprawling, bike-helmet-shaped stadium since 2013, when a group of Japanese architects and designers protested the proposal, saying that, at 3 million square feet, the 80,000-seater was “too big” for its surroundings. Acclaimed architect Toyo Ito and Pritzker Prize-winning Fumihiko Maki launched an online petition, imploring the government to stop construction. They have now fished their wish.
Hadid’s responses to all this criticism have been varied. In 2014, in a rare show of acquiescence, the architect modified the plans to include lighter and more cost-effective materials but not necessarily to downsize the structure. At the time, the Japan Sports Council had already sliced the budget for the stadium in half, from 300 billion yen (about $2.4 billion) to 169 billion yen (about $1.3 billion). Later in the year, Hadid slammed the Japanese architects protesting the stadium, suggesting that they were both sore losers and xenophobic in their stance against an Iraqi-British architect building in Japan.
The final nail in the coffin is unclear, but in a statement, Hadid’s firm denied that rising costs were to blame.
The stadium cancellation is one in a long string of controversies that have recently plagued the Pritzer Prize–winning architect. She deflected any responsibility over the deaths of migrant workers connected to the World Cup construction site. Her selection as the architect for the $1 billion Iraq parliament building was shady. And just earlier this year, after five months of legal battle, Hadid settled on a libel case against the New York Review of Books and its critic Martin Filler.
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