Tokyo 2020

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Studio Instructor(s)

Tom Verebes

Program: Olympic Stadium

Scale: 70,000 seat stadium

Site: Tokyo, Japan

The brief and site for this studio is the design of the Tokyo Olympic Park, comprising an Olympic Stadium, other sport event buildings and ancillary facilities, and the public grounds of the Olympic Park, both during and after the 2020 Olympic Games. A paramount design consideration is a Legacy Plan for an 8-year Post-Olympic stage for the sustainability of the site and the facilities to adapt and evolve, and to remain valued and functional in the post-Olympic legacy. The Olympics encapsulate the paradox of permanence and change, and as such, the core of this studio’s problematic is an evolutionary agenda

The Olympic ‘Park’ is a ripe context with which to test the dualities of nature and artifice, and synergetic integration of urban culture and so-called nature, through testing of the design repercussions of a paradigm shift from mechanic systems to life-like feedback and design intelligence. With associative design methodologies and sentient computational techniques, the studio will explore the qualities and metrics of sunlight, wind, views and other environmental parameters, long span structures as applied to the stadium, and the repercussions of their morphological variants, differentiations, mutations and adaptations.

This studio will experiment with Material Computation and Form-finding methodologies, to achieve stability in long-span structures through dynamic formative design processes. The interrelationship between material and digital methods pursues the premise that all matter has the capability to self-compute the state-space of its structural, geometrical and topological organisation.