Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION HANDBOOK 2
Figure 13. Model for swarm regulation of the nest environment. Building is driven by multiple foci
of intense soil movement that can drive soil transport autonomously. The various foci also
compete with one another for building agents (i.e. termites). A focus is initiated by an AC
perturbation, and is sustained by a positive feedback loop called stigmergy. AC
perturbations also sustain the focus of building. As building proceeds, the level of AC
perturbation abates. Building will continue being driven by stigmergy, but this has a
natural decay time.
The building-as-machine paradigm cannot quite capture this kind of seamless integration, largely
because it regards structure as something distinct from function. It is therefore unlikely that the living
building can emerge from this design tradition. In living systems, however, no such distinction is
possible: structure is function and function is structure. At present, simply stating this offers little
practical help in telling us how to realize a living building, but it at least points us the right way:
toward buildings that are extended organisms, where function and structure meld, and are controlled
by the over-riding demands of homeostasis.
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Conclusions
Architects and engineers have lately been looking to building designs inspired by the remarkable
termite mounds of southern Africa. The structure and function of termite mounds turns out to be far
more complex, novel and interesting than has heretofore been imagined, and this has opened the door
to a wide range of new potential “termite-inspired” designs for passive climate control in buildings.
Among the most interesting is a unique mode of capture of the “AC energy” transients that are
inherent in turbulent wind. This is, by far, the most common and energy capacious source of wind
energy on Earth, but it is also a form of wind energy that has been largely ignored in current windpower
engineering, largely because capturing it for useful work has proven to be elusive. Termites
have learned how to do precisely this. They do so through using complex structures to tune the broad