GGA Architecture PLLC

Quietly, in late December, the Japanese government plucked Kengo Kuma out of architectural obscurity to replace Zaha Hadid to design the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Stadium. In choosing Kuma's so-called "hamburger" design, Japan's Olympic overseers showed their lack of appetite for anything bold, daring, or inspiring. Kuma's stale retread of a stadium will be a loss for global architecture, the Tokyo Olympics, Hadid, and even Kuma himself, as Hadid's firm is now said to be probing whether Kuma's plan borrows a bit too heavily from hers. There's a lesson for architects here, and for all those whose livelihoods rely on the purses of capricious men, and it dates back to the very land that birthed the Olympics. In Ancient Greece, on the island of Crete, King Minos' wayward wife had a bizarre affair with a raging bull. When she then gave birth to a terrifying half-man half-bull Minotaur, King Minos faced an unappealing dilemma many fathers will sympathize with - where to house this ravenous stepson? So he commissioned the famed Athenian architect Daedalus and his son Icarus to design an elaborate maze, called labyrinthos, to imprison the beast. But Daedalus suffered a fate far worse than an unpaid invoice when an enraged King Minos threw father and son into their very own labyrinth for daring to help his daughter's lover both escape and slay the Minotaur. From here the story becomes more familiar as Icarus infamously flew too close to the sun during their escape. This Greek myth is the O.G. lesson about hubris, but for architects and all those who are self-employed, the message is far different - beware of kings and powerful people bearing grand commissions, for they are fickle and cruel. And now Zaha Hadid has learned the hard way that nothing is different in modern Japan. In 1994, Haruki Murakami published his masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where, as one New York Times critic proclaimed, "East meets West." Yet Murakami's Japan is still being run by powerful men, and men only, who, while modern in appearance, don't behave all that differently than good ol' King Minos. Similarities to ancient Crete abound. Dark, inescapable wells have replaced labyrinths. Even one of the heroines, Creta Kano, "the prostitute of the mind," is named after Daedalus' island of doom. In 2012, Hadid won the fiercely fought design competition for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Stadium. Her stadium would have been a sinuous voluptuous beauty. It would easily have been one of the most dynamic and triumphant stadiums in an Olympic lineage that too often has veered to retrograde and utilitarian bowls like Kuma's low-energy "winner." Her selection was stunning for such a conservative country and offered hope that its establishment was indeed changing. But, suddenly last summer last summer, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe smugly announced that he was scrapping Zaha Hadid's design because of its supposed high price tag. Under any other circumstance this would have been a reasonable and sincere concern - if Hadid had been told first and given a chance to address the cost.

Sadly, few rallied around Hadid -- the most influential architect of our time and probably the most important female architect of all time. On the contrary, high-profile politicians, architects, and designers -- all men -- rushed to form a pig-pile of scorn and snobbery. Arata Isozaki, the prominent Japanese architect, in a poor attempt at humor, likened her design to "...a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away." Pritzker Prize-winning Fumihiko Maki organized a group of fellow small-minded architects and designers to decry Hadid's plan and even held a symposium called "Re-thinking the New National Olympic Stadium." Even the head of the committee that originally chose Hadid's design, former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, joined the conga line of contempt by saying "It looks like an oyster. I've always hated it."

It's apparent that the "Japanese Architects Club For Men," along with the nation's political elite, so well understood by Murakami, achieved what they had set out to do in their feudal misogyny and killed two wind-up birds at the same time, an architect who was both a foreigner and a woman. But then again, this would come as no surprise to Creta Kano.

Source: Huffington Post. Garo Gumusyan. January 19, 2016.