Japan’s Sports Council has chosen the winner of a design contest for the country’s new national stadium. The winning design is that of award-winning Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, best known for the design of the London Aquatics Centre of the 2012 Olympics.
The new national stadium will have a retractable roof, a capacity of over 80,000 seats,and has characteristic fluid lines. It will be environmentally efficient, and is expected to come at a cost of between 1 and 1.6 billion USD.
The stadium replaces the present national stadium, which was built to serve as the centrepiece for the 1964 Olympics and is well known among football fans for hosting the Intercontinental Cup between 1980 and 2001. It is still occasionally used for local football matches.
Its replacement is also hoped to be a centrepiece for the Olympics as Tokyo is currently competing with Istanbul and Madrid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. It will furthermore host the final of the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and will also be used to attract a future FIFA World Cup.
Before works on the new stadium start, the old one first has to get demolished. The new stadium is scheduled to be completed in 2018.
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The announcement was the conclusion of a contest that featured 46 submissions and 11 finalists. Some of the other designs are possibly even more spectacular and definitely worth checking out. The Sports Council also announced a runner-up, which is Australian firm Cox Architecture. Japanese firm SANAA came in third.
All images courtesy of Jpnsport.com.