ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Tokyo 2020’

The Olympic hangover was a common fixture of 20th century urban history. It confronted new infrastructures, large-scale athletic venues, and public facilities suddenly drained of their economic and cultural value. With the development never going quite according to plan, it inevitably spawned periods of civic introspection and reevaluation. Reflecting on the Olympic Village as a new civic territory, future use of the Stadium, scaling down transportation systems, or kicking the tourism habit, these moments crystallized the cities’ urban futures. They paralleled existing patterns of growth and revealed infrastructural consequences. Sprawl in Mexico City, urban satellites in Atlanta, and internal development in Barcelona were accelerated and made apparent during the Olympics, only to be reconsidered and evaluated after the fact.

Over the last few Olympics, however, the question of the aftermath has assumed a central role in planning efforts. A notion of sustainable frameworks for urban regeneration has formed the basis of bids since Sydney’s, though the proposals have widely diverged in practice. Tokyo’s plan for the 2020 Olympics followed suit, calling to retrofit existing venues and integrate new construction with plans for the city at-large. The bid aimed to scale down the urban and economic footprint of the Games, describing strategies that suggest an overall compactness and adaptability.

Despite the initial civic-minded rhetoric, a ballooning budget and controversy over the construction of new venues, most notably the National Stadium, have diverted the discussion away from urban considerations. As a result, the central organization of major event venues has been diffused to the periphery. The budgetary issue even spilled over to the water sports venue located in Tokyo Bay, suggesting alternative sites outside of the prefecture. As such, the original notion of urban regeneration has been largely compromised, becoming a perfunctory agenda item that merely obscured the scope of post-Olympic planning.

This studio challenged students to situate an Olympics on the landfill in Tokyo Bay as well as design a constellation of fields with respect to its post-Olympic inhabitation—the afterlife of a short-term event with far-reaching consequences for the city. Forming a compelling notion of what the future of the site could be, student projects investigated the potentials latent in adapting Olympic programming to the present landfill, confronting the challenge of facilitating a transition from present to future uses in strict architectural terms. This studio focused on diverse issues of formal legibility, fitness, accommodation, and affordance in conjunction with concerns of materiality, ecological change, and infrastructural systems. Seizing the historical capacity of Olympic planning to reveal preexisting tendencies as well as more recent bids’ efforts to enact deliberate urban agendas, student projects suggest that the built form of the Olympic park can prefigure future patterns of development. Successful projects remained invested in the initial Olympic role while also demonstrating what the new infrastructure could mean to the city, the local inhabitants, and for the site after its symbolic appeal wears off.