Iidabashi Underground in Tokyo by Makoto Sei Watanabe

Makoto Sei Watanabe has proposed a new design method to better developed our cities and architecture by using computers in a new way to solve situation for complex surroundings with a software using simple algorithms, much like the growth of trees and fish, this can be employ in the fractal analysis of cities silhouettes, Makoto questions these pictures according to 'Horton's Law', which is the common basis for many natural phenomena.

This form of "meta-design" was employed for the underground station of Iidabashi in Tokyo, in the first computer-generated design architecture in the world. Watanabe studied architecture and worked in the office of Arata Isozaki in Tokyo, who was part of the Metabolism (新陳代謝 shinchintaisha) a group of post-war Japanese architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth.

Bu also, the theme of this project deals with the idea of the “invisible”, undergrounds are tubes buried in the land, which are too concealed from sight by the finishing and paneled surfaces of the station's interior.  And so the tube itself becomes and object which is hidden both from without and from within. The purpose of the project is to make what is hidden into something to be seen. 

One resolution was to make visible the physical fabric of the framework used in the construction of the subway tube, reducing the overall construction costs greatly and this way the station becomes a kind of museum of industry. But it took convincing of all parties and finally what was hidden was at last exposed, by introducing the 'Web Frame' inheriting the DNA of the engineering framework. The growth of the Web Frame was done by a computer program for automated generation of code with a given parameters, which is an on-going research project titled "Induction Cities."

Location:
35°42'13.70"N
139°44'48.87"E