Ariake Tennis Forest Park

Location: Ariake, Koto-ku, Tokyo

Owner: Tokyo

Renovation: July 2019

Seats: 9.388

In July 2019, the renovation work of the “Ariake Coliseum” stadium on the grounds of Ariake Tennis Forest Park was completed. The main content of the renovation on the seating is to ensure a viewing space where up to 300 wheelchair users, their attendants’ seats and additional seats can be installed, and to completely renovate the seats.

So far, the issues raised in the audience seating have been the comfort of the chairs and the size of the aisles. It is a chair that has been carefully used for many years with repeated maintenance, but it is a bit tight for the physique of modern Japanese, and the one-piece type that integrates the backrest and seat makes the aisle narrow. To solve this problem, all seats have been introduced with a folding stadium seat with separate parts for the backrest and seat.

There are three types of seats for the audience. By changing all seats to a two-piece seat with the seats jumping up, both the back seats and the rear seats are one size larger than conventional chairs.

The chair in the guest seating area is a padded seat with urethane wrapped upholstery. By installing them at intervals without connecting them to the next seat, we have enhanced the feeling of individual seating and differentiated them from other areas.

The area near the court, which is the lower half of the entire audience, is a rounded chair shape. The textured surface of the backrest and seat prevents the posture from collapsing when sitting, and the armrests between the seats allow the elbows to be positioned in the seated posture and also serve as a partition.

The high-rise area is filled with square-shaped chairs. The near-vertical back angle accommodates the natural downward-facing posture. Since there are no armrests, the slender form in which the raised seat is integrated with the backrest stands out, and the aisle can be used neatly and widely.

In facilities used by an undetermined number of people, the passageway in front of the chair should have a fixed size in consideration of evacuation in case of emergency.

When it is necessary to ensure a fixed number of seats in a limited space, the depth dimension of the chairs that can be placed in the front and rear intervals of each row will naturally be smaller. Half of the chairs up to now had the same depth dimension when seated because the seat was of the one-piece fixed type, but by introducing the two-piece folding seat type, the depth dimension when seated is free. It was tried to reduce, since the size of the aisle to be secured is limited to when the seat is empty, a large depth can be secured when the seat is lowered. We not only ensured safety, but also seating comfort.

A new handrail has been installed in the vertical aisle of the audience seating, allowing smooth passage even when going up and down stairs.