Eye-catching new buildings will be in short supply when the Tokyo Olympics open next week. Instead, most venues are repurposed – some from the city’s transformative 1964 Games
What if the Olympics were upstaged by a cat? It’s a real danger. Considerable interest has recently been generated by a 3D-animated giant calico creature that mews and wiggles from a newly installed billboard at passengers coming and going from Tokyo’s Shinjuku station. It’s hard to detect similar excitement about the architectural offering at the city’s Olympic Games, which are due to open a year late on 23 July.
Nor is it likely to match the impact of the city’s last Olympics in 1964. This was, according to the New York Times, “a debutante ball for democratic postwar Japan”, one that “crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis”. It was a festival of construction and design as well as sport: not just the striking Olympic facilities, but also the elevated highways that made Tokyo into the law-abiding version of Blade Runner that it is today – and the first of Japan’s famous bullet trains.
