Zaha Hadid has been a contender in the Olympic-architecture rodeo before, having designed the aquatics center for London 2012. Though that building was widely criticized—one architecture critic called it "cheap, tacky, and not in the spirit of the architecture of the permanent pool"—with her winning design for redevelopment of Tokyo's National Olympic Stadium, the architect will have another chance to try her hand at the craft.
Design Boom shows off a huge crop of renderings for the project, which will be host the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as a number of other events during the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. The venue will hold 80,000 spectators and feature—brace for the major shocker!—Hadid's hallmarks: undulating, curvaceous, continuous lines with a decidedly futuristic vibe.
The National Olympic Stadium is but one of many in-the-works projects for the Pritzker and Stirling prize winner these days; she's been tapped for a transportation hub in Saudi Arabia, as well as the stadium for the 2022 FiFA World Cup in Qatar, a condo building in NYC (her first project in the city), and a factory conversion in Belgrade, Serbia. Meanwhile, her "Innovation Tower" at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is about wrapped up, her own Miami condo is on the market for $5.7M, and Naomi Campbell's utterly insane spaceship house in Russia—well, let's not even go there. In the mean time, two more looks at the Tokyo 2020 stadium:
· zaha hadid: new national stadium of japan venue for tokyo 2020 olympics [Design Boom]
· All Zaha Hadid coverage [Curbed National]
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