For Tourists and Soccer Rooters,
Japan Arenas Are the Real Stars
By John Krich
The Wall St. Journal
May 31, 2002
SAPPORO, Japan -- Is this the most pampered and highly engineered plot of grass on the planet?
When World Cup teams start play at the indoors Sapporo Dome in the next week, they will be kicking the checkered ball across a lush-green pitch that grew outdoors in full sunlight.
In a half-day process before the first match, the 8,000 ton planter box holding the pitch will be eased on 34 wheels into the stadium through sliding-glass walls at a rate of four meters a minute, guided by hundreds of magnetic sensors originally developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. The raised concrete planter box is reduced to one-tenth of its weight by being raised on a bed of pressurized air. Then the pitch will be rotated 90 degrees to fit snugly against the movable grandstands. The natural lawn has an underground heating system to take away the chill of nights in Sapporo, Japan's most northern city.
No wonder the Sapporo Dome was tagged the "eighth Wonder of the World" by a South American newspaper. "If there is one World Cup stadium that really stands out from the bunch with lessons for the future, then it's in Sapporo," says Andrew James, a Sydney-based principal partner of the international-architecture firm HOK.
The real stars of the World Cup aren't athletes but the venues they will play in. In a competition almost as fierce as the event itself, Japan and South Korea have built or entirely remade 20 mammoth sporting showplaces at an average cost of $240 million a site in Japan and about $160 million in Korea. The 1998 World Cup in France was staged using only 10 stadiums.
Scattered through the urban and suburban landscapes of each country are the latest byproducts of their long-running rivalry: grand, often futuristic edifices featuring everything from Asian-inspired roofs with solar panels to environmentally cleansed moats and acoustically perfect grandstands. In an epoch when "stadiums have become the modern world's main civic-gathering points," this unprecedented outpouring of concrete offers enough technical wizardry to transform the future of sporting arenas, particularly in developing, space-conscious markets such as China, Mr. James says.
And the winner in this preliminary round of World Cup competition is clearly the magnificently movable, aesthetically aerodynamic 53.7 billion yen ($431.4 million) Sapporo Dome. Just as the Japanese redefined the radio, the automobile and the stereo -- through their cleverness with space efficiency and their tradition of building objects that change according to their function -- so too, in the Cup's most expensive stadium, have they redefined the basic coliseum structure.
"Like a Japanese home with its shoji screens and tatami mats, everything should be changeable and adapt to nature," says the man behind the Sapporo Dome, architect Hiroshi Hara.
For the Dome, not only did Mr. Hara devise an innovative method to combine an indoor stadium with a natural-grass pitch, he also found an economically viable solution to the multiple demands of such a facility. Through the use of movable lower sections of seating and 116 custom-designed rollers, the same central area can be transformed from a rectangular soccer pitch into a diamond-shaped baseball field and then into a wide-berthed concert stage.
The largest of Japan's five stadium domes, which is covered with a silvery, hyper-thin stainless-steel skin, has been likened to a balloon, a zeppelin and a giant airplane wing. "My buildings are meant to float and defy gravity," says Mr. Hara, a chain-smoking University of Tokyo architecture professor with long white locks and the air of a world-weary monk. "Even the roof is designed to move with the weight of snow, and the building, set in a garden filled with art, should evolve to meet the community's uses."
Mr. Hara, the renowned architect of Kyoto's huge multilevel railway station, gave the Dome a single-slope seating stand: It doesn't have second tiers or upper decks, meaning every seat has an unobstructed view of the playing field and the sweeping roof. The aim of such visual involvement, Mr. Hara says, "is to make the spectators feel that they, and not the athletes, are the true heroes."
That is also the point of the surrounding gardens and practice fields on the site -- 31 hectares reclaimed from a 160-hectare sheep meadow. Community leaders in Sapporo, Japan's fifth-largest city, known for its winter sports and annual snow festival, have dubbed the Dome Hiroba, which means plaza. Mr. Hara hopes the entire area will evolve according to the needs of the community, just as the playing field can.
"This is the realization of a long-held dream for a facility that can house important events in summer or winter," says Noboru Mizoguchi, point man for Sapporo's office of the World Cup Organizing Committee. But compared with the fuss New Yorkers might make if such a steel edifice replaced their Yankee Stadium, Sapporans seem somewhat blase about a structure that is far from downtown, in a city already dotted with various modernistic arenas leftover from its 1972 Winter Olympics. "It's a very good symbol for our city," says a Sapporan housewife, Hiroko Takeda. "But I'm happy because I love soccer just as much as baseball."
For all the investment, only three World Cup matches will be held at the Dome: The first-round showdowns between Germany and Saudi Arabia will be Saturday, June 1, Italy versus Ecuador on Monday, June 3, and the much-anticipated England and Argentina clash Friday, June 7. But unlike other stadiums placed in remote areas of Japan and South Korea, criticized as wasteful boondoggles, the Sapporo Dome was planned with many future uses. Indeed, the creation of this World Cup gem had little to do with the World Cup at all.
In the late 1970s, only a few years after Sapporo's building boom for the Winter Olympics, city leaders started to speak of the need for a large indoor arena. They wanted something that could withstand the fierce winters, and also perhaps lure a national league baseball team to call Sapporo home. In 1998, after years of lobbying and countless studies, and motivated by the opportunity of Japan's selection to co-host the World Cup, the city held a design competition for a new stadium. "The World Cup propelled us into action, even though our economy was in a downturn. We knew this was the moment to make our Dome," says Yoshiaki Tanaka, a former vice mayor and current owner of Sapporo's Consadole Football Club.
Designers had to meet the requirements of FIFA, football's governing body, that the stadium seat 40,000 and provide a natural-grass field while covering at least 60% of the seating, as well as satisfy Sapporo's need for a warm facility for baseball and winter events. Because natural fields will wilt after four hours inside a stadium, architects submitted plans for grass fields that could be lowered from an opening in the roof or grown in four parts. Mr. Hara's simple yet daring movable outdoor-field concept was the winner in a 7-1 vote.
At first, Mr. Hara recounts, "I thought of the two matching round shapes, inside and outside, as a pair of eyeglasses," referring to the dome and a matching round field next to it. Then he realized in order to create an opening for his motorized field, he would have to cut a straight edge along one side of his dome, and the dome had to be oblong, and extremely large, to be able to accommodate the shape of a baseball field. "With a Dome this big and unwieldy, I felt at once that it had to be built low to the ground so as to make it seem lighter," the creator explains. So Mr. Hara's final concept included submerging the stadium below ground, creating an igloo-like arena with warm air blowing up under the seats, as it does under a Japanese dining table.
That meant 360,000 cubic meters of earth had to be removed from the site. And this was just the beginning. During the 35 months of construction, Mr. Hara traveled from his Tokyo studio to Sapporo 140 times. He made countless adjustments. "You can't always follow blueprints in something this big," Mr. Hara says.
And there were other challenges. In winter, the temperature was so cold that workers' unprotected skin would stick to the steel. Metal welding became nearly impossible during two winters when the wind-chill factor reached record lows in Sapporo. Once the Dome opened, a block of ice that built up on the roof came crashing down on a car in the parking lot. As Mr. Tanaka explains, "Innovative designs also create unique accidents."
Since its inauguration a year ago, the Dome has hosted Sapporo's local soccer team, the Consadoles, concerts by Japanese pop stars and occasional away games from top baseball clubs such as the Seibu Lions. Tokyo's Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team is considering moving its home base to the Dome.
While its first year showed it can do better than break even, turning a profit of 36 million yen, the price of such transformability is high. The 80 workers required to effect the five-hour changeover from football to baseball modes cost 2.6 million yen.
"We hope this high-tech showplace can be a model, especially for cold-weather locales," says Mr. Tanaka, the former vice mayor. But to the Sapporo Dome's creator, Mr. Hara, the point is to prove that "buildings should always have more than one purpose, and not sit still for eternity."
For stadiums as eternal as this, they may even have to invent new games.
A Wonder of the WorldWhile World Cup spectators won't be able to see the Sapporo Dome's magic carpet of a field move into place, there are other architectural marvels they will be able to see:
1. Observation tower: Take a trip up the motorized staircase to get a view of Sapporo, or look down at the soccer action.
2. Bow Bridge Cafe: The back end of the Dome is a vast bow-shaped gangplank backed by see-through glass where cafe patrons can still get a view of the match.
3. Single-stand seating and movable seating: The foul-line seats for baseball swivel to turn into viewing areas virtually centimeters from the football action; the subtle gray seats are gently sloped, so those in the back rows still feel included.
4. Blackout screens: Mechanized curtains drop down all around to darken the stadium's edges and make for more concentrated viewing.
5. Acoustical panels: These should make the cheering sound amazingly crisp and hardly echo.
