Dive Brief:

• Opposition can be a great unifier, and opposition to Zaha Hadid's design for a 2020 Olympic stadium in Tokyo is bringing together architects and others who say the building is too much, is in the wrong place and will swamp its surroundings.
• As of Sunday, backers of the campaign, which is being led by two winners of the Pritzker Prize in architecture, Toyo Ito and Fumihiko Maki, claimed they had 14,508 signatures on a petition to the Japan Sports Council.
• The design the group is fighting calls for replacing Jingu Gaien National Stadium with a 290,000 square-meter (3.12 million square-foot), 80,000-seat facility.

Dive Insight:

According to the English translation of the petition that the opponents provide on their website, Hadid's design would "ruin Meiji Shrine Outer Gardens" and "has been imposed top-down without referendum via a closed design competition." The project is scheduled to get underway in July.