Some environmental strategies were as simple and old as biology. “We found that so much of the genius of nature is passive design,” he said. The architects also looked at the country’s traditional earthen structures for passive solar techniques. They clad the shells of their honeycomb with heat-reflective glass-fiber concrete panels, with an airspace beneath to insulate the spaces inside. In the courtyards, they used stone paving and concrete panels to retain coolness.

In the 1980s, before three-dimensional software, Hadid sometimes swished drawings on the glass top of Xerox machines as the light tumbler rolled, to kill the stiffness in designs: She was interested in movement. For the research center, computers programmed for energy conservation did the same, distorting the hexagons, a rational process producing woozy but climate-efficient forms.

The architects configured hexagonal office labs around hexagonal courtyards, and as the building moved toward the desert, they graduated the size of the cells to house the library, auditorium, data farm and mosque. Computers stretched and distorted each pavilion and courtyard to capture shade from the south and prevailing breezes from the north. The construction lines of the facade panels stretched over their steel frames. At the outskirts of the capital, pointed toward the desert — and Mecca — the building seemed ready to move.