Japan scraps zaha hadid tokyo stadium

The 2020 Olympic Games are only five years away, but Japan is still limbering up for the contest. Today, it shed a large piece of financial fat: Zaha Hadid's controversial stadium.

The centrepiece of the Olympic plan was already part of the city's proposal for hosting the competition in 2013, a stylish design featuring curving edges and a retractable roof. Since then, Hadid was asked to redesign the structure to make it smaller, but the project has acquired a reputation for being expensive and extravagant.

The venue, which would have seated 80,000, was set to be build on the same site as the stadium from the 1946 games (designed by Mitsuo Katayama), which had a much more compact capacity of 54,000.

Since it was first unveiled, though, the costs have almost doubled, according to officials, with an estimated budget of over $2 billion, which would make it pricier than the previous two tournament stadiums and potentially one of the costliest in sporting history.

"The current plan will go back to being a blank sheet of paper, and we will rethink it from scratch," Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the press.

Hadid has criticised Japan already for not wanting "a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium". "On the other hand," she pointed out to Dezeen, the country's other lead architects, who have all voiced displeasure with the design, "have work abroad. Whether it's Sejima, Toyo Ito, or Maki or Isozaki or Kengo Kuma."

Officials claim that rising costs for labour and materials are the cause of the raised budget, although these are factors that would affect the design chosen to replace Hadid's.