TOKYO » The Olympic stadium designed by the Pritzker-winning architect Zaha Hadid, to be built here for the 2020 Summer Games, looks to some like a pleasingly sleek, contoured spaceship. But many others deplore it, with one prominent Japanese architect saying it reminded him of a turtle. Another likened the $1.37 billion building, already projected to be the most expensive Olympic stadium in recent history, to another kind of animal.

"Why do we need this white elephant?" said Fumihiko Maki, also a Pritzker winner. "Tokyo is not a zoo."

For nearly a year, the criticism of the Hadid design has been full-throated – about 500 people took to the streets last summer to protest it as oversized and overpriced – while Hadid suggests that her critics are only embarrassing themselves and that they resent the hiring of a non-Japanese architect. "They don’t want a foreigner to build in Tokyo for a national stadium," she said in an interview with Dezeen, an architecture and design magazine.

Beyond the merits of her design, the debate illustrates how Olympic stadiums engender more passion than almost any other buildings and how the massive, expensive public projects become potent symbols of architectural prowess and economic pride – structures in which countries invest nothing less than their national identities.

"There is always some controversy around large iconic buildings," said Mike Holleman of Heery International, the architectural firm that designed the stadium for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. "They are opportunities for countries to say to the world: ‘We’ve arrived; here’s an iconic venue. We can do that.’ That is the goal, to show the world that you can step up."

Indeed, the Japan Sport Council, which governs the Tokyo stadium, said in an emailed statement: "We aim to build Japan’s National Stadium to boast to the world."

Sometimes, a country appears to get it right, as China seemed to do in Beijing with its National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics – nicknamed the Bird’s Nest because of Herzog & de Meuron’s lattice exterior. It received international acclaim for what a critic in The New York Times called its "intoxicating beauty."

The Tokyo stadium faces another challenge that has dogged its cousins: It must avoid becoming an economic burden by carving out a life as an arena long after the closing ceremonies.

Montreal’s stadium, for example, designed for the 1976 Olympics by French architect Roger Taillibert, left the city with more than $2 billion in debt that took 30 years to repay, earning the arena a nickname change from the Big O to the Big Owe. Scheduled events there are sporadic, as they are for the stadium used for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, which has been widely criticized for not having a post-Olympics plan. One success story is the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which has twice served as an Olympics arena – in 1932 and 1984 – and continues to be used for college football and other events.

Olympics officials are emphasizing permanent use in evaluating possible sites for the 2024 Summer Olympics. "The problem with Olympic stadiums is it’s somehow the most terrible commitment," said Jacques Herzog, one of the Bird’s Nest architects. "You have to think about what will happen after the Games are over. The majority are there for nothing, or are ruins, or don’t really have a meaning anymore."

In Tokyo, the Sport Council has unveiled an elaborate post-Olympics plan for the new, 80,000-seat stadium that includes sports, cultural and civic events.

"A city that builds a stadium solely for the Olympics, without solid plans in place for its long-term use, will greatly diminish the stadium’s future viability," Hadid said in emailed responses to questions.

But none of that planning has stemmed criticism of the design by Hadid, an Iraqi-British architect who won an international competition to design the stadium.

Some critics are concerned that the new stadium, which is much larger than an existing, 54,000-seat stadium built for the 1964 Summer Olympics, will encroach on the nearby historic Meiji Shrine, built in central Tokyo in the early 20th century to commemorate Emperor Meiji.

The arena would occupy part of the shrine’s outer gardens, which preservationists say would leave no breathing space and raises traffic and safety concerns.

Officials here have reacted to the public outcry by reducing the proposed stadium’s size and budget. Hadid’s earlier version came in at about $2.5 billion, more than twice the $1.1 billion originally allocated for the stadium.

The Sport Council at first called for a retractable roof to soundproof future cultural events like concerts. The steep cost of building and maintaining such an apparatus, critics said, would take away valuable materials and financial resources still needed for reconstruction after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

After sustained objections from critics, including Maki and the 2013 Pritzker winner Toyo Ito, the Japanese government reduced the stadium’s budget to $1.37 billion and its site to 52 acres, down from 71. The revised design still includes a retractable roof.

"All projects around the world go through this process of design evolution," said Hadid, who also designed the aquatics center for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. "Working with our Japanese partners to refine the design was always an expected part of the process."

Hadid’s firm worked with four design firms – three of them Japanese – to revise the stadium, the Sport Council said.

Even after the government scaled back the project, however, the chorus of criticism intensified, sometimes emphasizing a different angle. In an open letter to the Sport Council, a prominent Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, wrote that he was "shocked to see that the dynamism present in the original had gone" in the new designs.

"What remains is a dull, slow form," Isozaki wrote, "like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away."

"I can’t find Zaha’s hand anymore," he added in an interview. "I can only see the pressures of the council."

Critics in Japan are divided over how to resolve the situation. Isozaki, for example, has called for Hadid to come up with a new design without the help of Japanese firms.

Others have urged the Sport Council to scrap Hadid’s plan altogether. Instead, they argue, the government should renovate the existing national stadium, despite plans for it to be demolished this month.

In any case, both the Sport Council and Hadid say retrofitting the existing stadium is not viable because the building does not meet Olympic stadium requirements or current seismic codes. Reinforcing the existing structure, they said, would cost far more than critics estimate, adding that even after renovation, the spectator conditions would not be ideal.

Though Hadid’s critics have been vocal, previous generations of Olympic stadiums have provoked similarly strong reactions.

"Stadiums always seem to be in this odd category of potential national symbol for a very short period of time and then potential white elephants," said Thomas Hanrahan, dean of the School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute. "That has nothing to do with the architectural design; that’s the nature of the discussion in Tokyo – it has to do with planning and the long-term vision."

Amy Qin and Robin Pogrebin, New York Times

© 2015 The New York Times Company