Legacy Planning is supposed to ensure the long-term benefits of Olympic Parks after the Olympic Games have passed. But Olympic Parks are inactive and unoccupied for several years between the closing of Olympics mega-events and the start of the master planning required for landscape renewal. It's Folly to Think: Reuse and the Olympic Games accelerates the landscape's transition from Olympic Games to public parks by introducing contemporary architectural follies to the landscape of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Through an extensive analysis of existing Legacy Plans and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, this thesis proposes the sustainable reuse of timber elements from the Olympic Village Plaza into small-scale architectural follies. As visually, physically, and socially-engaging spaces, this design intervention provides a transformable and useful space: a public park that criticizes and responds to previous Legacy initiatives while generating a thoughtful architecture to memorialize the Games and promote its highest value-national unity.

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Honors Funding

Creative Projects 2021, School of Architecture 2021, 2021