Today I wanted to share an interesting article from the Nautilus Magazine that I read about the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, and how its architecture mimics the self-cooling mechanisms of termites.
Back in 1991, architect Mick Pearce was faced with the challenge to design Zimbabwe’s largest commercial building with unconventional air conditioning. Peculiarly enough, he consulted the towering termite mounds spanning the African savanna to tackle this challenge. These natural structures house millions of termites that somehow maintain comfortable temperatures despite the scorching heat outside. But that’s not all.
Pearce’s resulting design was revolutionary. Inside the Eastgate Centre was elaborate ductwork and tall chimneys, meant to mimic the termites’ convection-based cooling system. The building opened in 1996 and celebrated this biomimetic design that regulated temperature at a fraction of the cost of conventional buildings.
What’s even more interesting is around the same time the Eastgate Centre opened, scientist Scott Turner was conducting groundbreaking research on termite mounds. He found that the accepted understanding of how termite mounds worked was completely wrong. These structures weren’t actually air conditioners at all – they were more like lungs. Instead of using heat-driven convection, the mounds used wind pressure and porous surfaces to regulate gas exchange, much like our own respiratory systems.
The Eastgate Centre worked brilliantly, but not for the reasons anyone thought. Its success came from accidentally incorporating some of the termites’ actual temperature-regulating strategies, like using thermal mass and permeable surfaces. As Turner noted, “Eastgate Centre succeeded because Pearce was a very good architect rather than a crude imitator of nature.”
This story reveals a deeper truth about biomimicry: our first interpretations of nature’s solutions are often oversimplified. We see a termite mound and don’t think much of it because at the surface it’s just another everyday quirk of the organisms coexisting around us. We don’t need to care. But nature’s solutions are usually more nuanced and complex than they appear.
The future of biomimicry might look very different from what you may think. According to engineer Rupert Soar, most of what we call biomimicry today is really just “biophilia” – our innate desire to connect with nature. True biomimicry might mean abandoning our preference for symmetrical, controlled designs in favor of more organic, emergen solutions.
Imagine buildings designed not by human architects drawing inspiration from nature, but by computer programs that simulate the very processes nature uses. These “agent-based” systems could generate structures that optimize for multiple functions simultaneously, just as evolution does. The results might look messy and chaotic to our eyes, but they could be far more efficient and adaptable than our current designs.
The Eastgate Centre stands as both a triumph and a humbling reminder. It shows that we can create remarkable sustainable architecture inspired by nature, even when our understanding is imperfect. But it also suggests that if we want to truly learn from nature, we might need to let go of our preconceptions about what good design looks like.
As our cities grow more complex and our need for sustainable solutions becomes more urgent, maybe we’re already becoming more like nature’s greatest builders than we realize. The question is: are we ready to embrace truly biomimetic solutions, even if they challenge our aesthetic preferences and our desire for control?
The next chapter in the story of biomimicry might require us to be a little more like the termites themselves – willing to build something that looks messy to outsiders but works beautifully for its intended purpose. After all, nature’s solutions rarely come in perfect geometric shapes, but they’ve solved our greatest challenges in stem and engineering by far compared to any human design.
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