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Will the buildings of the future be grown underwater? Will the buildings of the future be grown underwater?
(6 months later)
A spiny pencil urchin hangs in a A spiny pencil urchin hangs in a perspex case next to the lacy sheath of a glass sponge. Nearby lie the cracked-open skulls of crows and robins, a collection of knobbly seed pods and a globular lump of brain coral. Eerily lit from below by glowing tables, which themselves seem to grow from the floor like mutant water lilies, it looks like the set of a space-age Natural History Museum. In fact, this curious collection of bones and barnacles is the future of architecture – according to Michael Pawlyn.
perspex case next to the lacy sheath of a glass sponge. Nearby lie “Nature is a largely untapped sourcebook for architects,” he says, standing in the Architecture Foundation’s south London gallery, surrounded by a wunderkammer of odds and ends from the natural world that he has assembled for his first solo exhibition, Designing with Nature. “In the past, designers have tended to focus on just a few examples, like termite mounds or shell structures, but I really think nature holds the answers to making buildings that are fit for the next billion years.”
the cracked-open skulls of crows and robins, a collection of knobbly Through his practice, Exploration Architecture, Pawlyn has been investigating the biomimicry’s design potential for the past seven years, exploring what everything from lichen to lizards have to offer the design of our built environment. Trained as an architect, he worked for Nicholas Grimshaw for 10 years and was central to the team that conceived the Eden Project, leading the design of the temperate and humid biomes, which erupt from the former clay pit in Cornwall like a sci-fi fungus.
seed pods and a globular lump of brain coral. Eerily lit from below “All my work is driven by a frustration with the word ‘sustainable’,” he says. “It suggests something that is just about good enough, but we need to be looking at truly restorative solutions. We’ve gone from dominating nature to learning from bits of it, but now we should be looking at total reconciliation with the natural world.”
by glowing tables, which themselves seem to grow from the floor like And Pawlyn thinks the best solutions are already out there, lurking in a rich seam of natural evolution waiting to be mined.
mutant water lilies, it looks like the set of a space-age Natural “Take the spookfish,” he says. “It lives 1,000m below the surface of the sea, so it has developed two sets of eyes that use mirrors to focus the faintest glimmers of light on to its retina.” These “diverticular” eyes can detect bioluminescent light from other creatures many metres away – both above and below – allowing the fish to keep track of predators and prey in the murky gloom.
History Museum. In fact, this curious collection of bones and Buildings might not need to keep a lookout for predators by night, but they do need to maximise the amount of natural light they receive, particularly in deep-plan office blocks that all too often have artificial lights on throughout the day. So, learning from the spookfish, Pawlyn and his team have developed an office building with a kind of fish-eye mirror lens in its atrium, designed to reflect light deep into the office floors.
barnacles is the future of architecture – according to Michael The building also steals tips from some other friends from the deep, namely the brittle sea star and the living stone plant. Scientists recently discovered that the sea star, which is otherwise blind, has a unique exoskeleton covered with crystalline lenses, forming an all-seeing eye across its skin. Stone plants, meanwhile, grow underground and have developed translucent pockets in their leaves to allow light to reach photosynthetic tissues deep within the subterranean foliage. Both of these natural structures have informed the design of the office block’s facade and roof, which incorporate daylight tubes and fibre optics to channel light down to the floors below. Pawlyn says the resulting building would use 50% less glass than an equivalent office block of the same floor area, while the abundance of natural light would result in a 10% increase in employee productivity. There is sadly no way of testing these bold claims, as the project – like most of the designs in the exhibition – is a self-initiated speculation and remains unbuilt.
Pawlyn. But one experiment that has already yielded impressive real-world results can be found on what was formerly a hectare of dusty sand in Qatar, where a pilot project aimed at “greening the desert” is underway. Taking inspiration, as ever, from a curiously named creature, the Sahara Forest Project draws key lessons from the Namibian fog-basking beetle, which has evolved a cunning way of harvesting its own fresh water in the desert – collecting condensation on its bumpy shell, which runs down into its mouth.
“Nature The beetle’s principles have been used to develop a complex of seawater-cooled greenhouses, in which the evaporation of seawater is increased to create higher humidity, while a large surface area is created for condensation. In this way, saline water can be turned into fresh water just using the sun, the wind and a small amount of pumping energy.
is a largely untapped sourcebook for architects,” he says, standing “I was astonished that they managed to grow cucumbers and tomatoes throughout the Qatari summer,” says Pawlyn. “And there is also a useful byproduct that could have implications for construction.” He shows me a gnarled block the size of a shoebox, which looks like a sponge dipped in plaster. It turns out this is an evaporator pad from one of the seawater tanks, which has become encrusted with calcium carbonate as the water has evaporated – forming a handy lightweight building block.
in the Architecture Foundation’s south London gallery, surrounded by Nearby lies another encrusted object that looks like a bundle of pipes dredged from the Titanic, or a giant kettle filament suffering from a serious case of limescale. This, says Pawlyn, is the future of “biorock”, the result of passing a low electric current through a metal armature immersed in the sea, attracting mineral deposition over time.
a wunderkammer of odds and ends from the natural world that he has “It’s a lesson taken from the coccolithophore,” he says, pointing to an electron micrograph image of what looks like an elaborate ball of crochet, all interlocking woven circles. “It’s a single-cell marine organism, enclosed in a kind of cage made from calcium carbonate, which it pulls from the surrounding seawater. Over the years, these organisms capture carbon and fall to the sea floor, building up layers of limestone.”
assembled for his first solo exhibition, Designing with Nature. “In Using the coccolithophore’s principles, he says, we can potentially “grow” buildings from atmospheric carbon, employing a technique that was originally developed by marine biologist Thomas Goreau for rebuilding coral reefs. A project currently being designed in collaboration with Queens University, Belfast, could see the first biorock pavilion grown underwater, using a wire mesh structure in the form of a ribbed seashell. At a deposition rate of 50mm a year, it’s not exactly rapid-response construction, although Pawlyn estimates the lightweight shell structure they have designed could be fully grown in only 18 months.
the past, designers have tended to focus on just a few examples, like Beyond the projects on show, the walls of the exhibition are lined with 20 more creatures and their as-yet untapped potential, from the orbweaver spider to the mud-dauber wasp, which could inform our built environment over the coming millennia if Pawlyn has his way. “We just have to look a bit harder,” he says. “The answers are already out there – perfected by 3.6bn years of research and development.”
termite mounds or shell structures, but I really think nature holds
the answers to making buildings that are fit for the next billion
years.”
Through
his practice, Exploration Architecture,
Pawlyn has been investigating the biomimicry’s design
potential for the past seven years, exploring what everything from lichen to
lizards have to offer the design of our built environment. Trained as
an architect, he worked for Nicholas Grimshaw
for 10 years and was central to the team that conceived the Eden
Project, leading the
design of the temperate and humid biomes, which erupt from the former
clay pit in Cornwall like a sci-fi fungus.
“All
my work is driven by a frustration with the word ‘sustainable’,” he
says. “It suggests something that is just about good enough, but we
need to be looking at truly restorative solutions. We’ve gone from
dominating nature to learning from bits of it, but now we should be
looking at total reconciliation with the natural world.”
And Pawlyn thinks the best solutions are already out there,
lurking in a rich seam of natural evolution waiting to be mined.
“Take
the spookfish,” he says. “It lives 1,000m below the surface
of the sea, so it has developed two sets of eyes that use mirrors to
focus the faintest glimmers of light on to its retina.” These
“diverticular” eyes can detect bioluminescent light from
other creatures many metres away – both above and below –
allowing the fish to keep track of predators and prey in the murky
gloom.
Buildings
might not need to keep a lookout for predators by night,
but they do need to maximise the amount of natural light they
receive, particularly in deep-plan office blocks that all too often
have artificial lights on throughout the day. So, learning from the
spookfish, Pawlyn and his team have developed an office building with a kind of fish-eye mirror lens in its atrium, designed to reflect
light deep into the office floors.
The
building also steals tips from some other friends from the deep,
namely the brittle sea star and the living stone plant. Scientists
recently discovered that the sea star, which is otherwise blind, has
a unique exoskeleton covered with crystalline lenses,
forming an all-seeing eye across its skin. Stone plants, meanwhile,
grow underground and have developed translucent pockets in their
leaves
to allow light to reach photosynthetic tissues deep within the
subterranean foliage. Both of these natural structures have informed
the design of the office block’s facade and roof, which incorporate
daylight tubes and fibre optics to channel light down to the floors
below. Pawlyn says the resulting building would use 50% less
glass than an equivalent office block of the same floor area, while
the abundance of natural light would result in a 10% increase
in employee productivity. There is sadly no way of testing these bold
claims, as the project – like most of the designs in the exhibition
– is a self-initiated speculation and remains unbuilt.
But one
experiment that has already yielded impressive real-world results can
be found on what was formerly a hectare of dusty sand in Qatar, where
a pilot project aimed at “greening the desert” is underway.
Taking inspiration, as ever, from a curiously named creature, the
Sahara Forest Project
draws key lessons from the Namibian fog-basking beetle,
which has evolved a cunning way of harvesting its own fresh water in
the desert – collecting condensation on its bumpy shell, which
runs down into its mouth.
The
beetle’s principles have been used to develop a complex of
seawater-cooled greenhouses, in which the evaporation
of seawater is increased to create higher humidity, while a large
surface area is created for condensation. In this way, saline water
can be turned into fresh water just using the sun, the wind and a
small amount of pumping energy.
“I
was astonished that they managed to grow cucumbers and tomatoes
throughout the Qatari summer,” says Pawlyn. “And there is also a
useful byproduct that could have implications for construction.” He
shows me a gnarled block the size of a shoebox, which looks like a
sponge dipped in plaster. It turns out this is an
evaporator pad from one of the seawater tanks, which has become
encrusted with calcium carbonate as the water has evaporated –
forming a handy lightweight building block.
Nearby
lies another encrusted object that looks like a bundle of pipes
dredged from the Titanic, or a giant kettle filament suffering from a
serious case of limescale. This, says Pawlyn, is the future of
“biorock”, the result of passing a low electric current through a
metal armature immersed in the sea, attracting mineral deposition
over time.
“It’s
a lesson taken from the coccolithophore,” he says,
pointing to an electron micrograph image of what looks like an
elaborate ball of crochet, all interlocking woven
circles. “It’s a single-cell marine organism, enclosed in a kind of
cage made from calcium carbonate, which it pulls from the surrounding
seawater. Over the years, these organisms capture carbon and fall to
the sea floor, building up layers of limestone.”
Using
the coccolithophore’s principles, he says, we can potentially “grow”
buildings from atmospheric carbon, employing a technique that was
originally developed by marine biologist Thomas Goreau for rebuilding
coral reefs. A project currently being designed in collaboration with
Queens University, Belfast, could see the first biorock pavilion grown
underwater, using a wire mesh structure in the form of a ribbed
seashell. At a deposition rate of 50mm a year, it’s not exactly
rapid-response construction, although Pawlyn estimates the
lightweight shell structure they have designed could be fully grown
in only 18 months.
Beyond
the projects on show, the walls of the exhibition are lined with 20
more creatures and their as-yet untapped potential, from the
orbweaver spider to the mud-dauber wasp, which could inform our built
environment over the coming millennia if Pawlyn has his way. “We
just have to look a bit harder,” he says. “The answers are
already out there – perfected by 3.6bn years of research and
development.”
• Michael Pawlyn will deliver a lecture at the Architecture Foundation tonight, Monday 17 February at 7pm. A further panel discussion, Designing with Parameters, chaired by Marcos Cruz and featuring Michael Pawlyn, Rupert Soar, Nerea Calvillo and Patrik Schumacher, will take place on 27 February at 7pm.• Michael Pawlyn will deliver a lecture at the Architecture Foundation tonight, Monday 17 February at 7pm. A further panel discussion, Designing with Parameters, chaired by Marcos Cruz and featuring Michael Pawlyn, Rupert Soar, Nerea Calvillo and Patrik Schumacher, will take place on 27 February at 7pm.