The architectural competition for the terminal was famously intense, and winning it required the then-wife-and-husband team of Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo to rethink the established template of terminal design. Located on an important waterfront site in Japan’s second most populous city, the high-profile commission attracted 660 entries from around the world, the country's largest international competition to date. [1] The enormous, 430 meter-long project took eight years and a budget of £150 million to complete, and required FOA to temporarily relocate their studios to Yokohama to supervise construction. The public opening of the terminal occurred in 2002, serendipitously coinciding with the final game of the World Cup being held only a few miles from the shoreline.