The Games’ architectural star was the Yoyogi National Gymnasium, originally designed by Kenzo Tange for swimming and diving, a swooping marvel of cantilevers and hanging roofs and hovering concrete. 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. 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”. Nor is it likely to match the impact of the city’s last Olympics in 1964. 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. 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.
W hat if the Olympics were upstaged by a cat? It’s a real danger.
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