The seemingly random arrangement of columns at Sendai, as well as the organic inspiration of seaweed transformed digitally into structure, suggests a strong precedent for the so-called “flux structure” that Sasaki designed for Isozaki’s Florence train station. He implemented a new shape-analysis approach, broadly described at the beginning of this article, that he calls Extended Evolutionary Structural Optimization (EESO). This is Sasaki’s own version of ESO (he added “Extended”), which is a relatively established methodology of efficient structural design in engineering. In a catalog for a 2007 exhibition of his work at London’s Architectural Association, Sasaki wrote that, with EESO, he uses “the principles of evolution and self-organization of living creatures, adapted from an engineering standpoint, to generate rational structural shapes within a computer.”

The constraints of the Florence station design called for the top roof to remain flat while the underside could fluctuate up to 40 feet below the roof surface for the span of the 1,300-by-130-foot structure. In the digital EESO model, Sasaki tweaked each individual component of a grid structure for the primary form (the flat roof plane) with localized forces until a web of “columns” emerged that not only addressed the targeted structural load profile, but did so with the least amount of materials. If it’s not quite turning Sendai on its side, it’s close. “We have to make a form that is reasonable,” says Sasaki. “And the computer makes that happen.”