Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION HANDBOOK 2
complex architecture of the interface that termites build - the mound - to manage the environment in
their collectively constructed space – the nest [31].
New rapid manufacturing and free-form fabrication techniques make it now feasible to build walls
that incorporate some of these design principles (Figure 10). Imagine, for example, porous walls that
are permeated with a complex reticulum that, like in the termite mound, acts as a low-pass filter for
turbulent winds. In this instance, an interior space of a building could be wind-ventilated without
having to resort to tall chimneys, and without subjecting the inhabitants to the inconvenient gustiness
that attends to the usual means of local wind capture, namely opening a window. Now, it is the
windows that are the barriers and the walls that connect the inhabitants to the world outside. Or,
imagine a cladding system that mimics the mound’s complex interface at the surface conduits and
egress tunnels (Figure 10). One could employ such claddings as whole-building wind-capture devices,
which greatly expands a building’s capacity for wind capture. Or, imagine a wall that is tuned for
differential mass exchange where the high-frequency components of turbulent winds can
evaporatively cool a porous wall’s surface layers and provide natural cooling for air forced through
the walls by wind’s lower-frequency components. The possibilities, we hope you will agree, are large.
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Beyond biomimicry
Indeed, the possibilities may be more than large: they may be vast. This is because the termite mound
is not simply a structural arena for interesting function. It is itself a function, sustained by an ongoing
construction process that reflects the physiological predilections of the myriad agents that build and
maintain it. The mound, in short, is the embodiment of the termites’ “extended physiology” [29, 32,
33]. This raises the intriguing idea that building design can go “beyond biomimicry”, to design
buildings that do not simply imitate life but are themselves “alive” in the sense that termite mounds
are.
Figure 11. The standard negative feedback model for regulating the built environment
Realizing the living building is predicated upon there being a clear idea of what distinguishes living
systems from non-living ones. Unfortunately, most of the criteria that are commonly put forth by
biologists - cellular organization, replication, heredity, reproduction, self-organization, low entropy -
are not very informative for building designers. Remarkably, they are not even particularly helpful in
the life sciences. Reproduction, for example, is not a useful criterion for recognizing living systems,
such as the biosphere, that do not reproduce. Nor is a concept like self-organization much help: many
complex non-living systems, like clouds, are self-organizing, so how are these to be distinguished as
not-life? Fortunately, there is one feature that reliably distinguishes life in a variety of contexts and
scales. That is homeostasis, the tendency of living systems to gravitate toward a particular adaptive
state in the face of disruptive perturbations. Realizing the living building therefore means realizing the
homeostatic building.
The idea of homeostasis is nothing new to architects and engineers, of course: it is standard practice to
outfit buildings with systems to regulate particular properties of the built environment: temperature,
humidity, air quality and so forth. The focus here is on machines that do work to manipulate a
property through negative feedback control (Figure 11). Thus, a property is sensed, its deviation from
some desired value is assessed, and a machine is activated that does work to offset the deviation. Such
systems range in complexity from simple house thermostats to sophisticated Building Energy