Japan Scraps Olympic Design

Japan will abandon Olympic stadium plans by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, the country’s prime minister announced Friday. Instead, it will start over on designs for the 2020 Summer Games because the existing plans are proving too costly. “We have decided to go back to the start on the Tokyo Olympics-Paralympics stadium plan, and start over from zero,” Shinzo Abe said after a meeting with the organizing committee, adding that it won’t be finished in time for the 2019 Rugby World Cup. The project was slated to cost $2 billion.