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Michael Pawlyn is a conceptual and functional pioneer. As the founder of Exploration Architecture, a practice that challenges the fundamental processes of traditional design by initiating schemes derived from nature, Pawlyn closely studies, then mimics biology with the aim of improving the quality of people’s lives while creating highly innovative and sustainable design solutions. This is biomimicry.
His passion for the environment evolved from working on the renowned Eden Project with Grimshaw Architects. Now his elaborations on natural processes are evident in undertakings such as the Sahara Forest Project which aims to produce large amounts of renewable energy, food and water as well as reversing desertification using two technologies: the seawater greenhouse, a brilliant invention that creates a cool growing environment in arid climates whilst producing distilled water from seawater. The second, concentrated solar power (CSP), involves concentrating the sun’s heat to create steam that drives conventional turbines, producing zero carbon electricity twice as efficiently as photovoltaics. Pawlyn’s ethos is taking architecture in a new direction.
Could you explain what biomimicry is and how it informs your architecture?
Put simply, it’s the idea of looking to nature as a source of inspiration for new solutions. Put it another way, you could look at nature at being a vast array of products that have benefited from a 3.8 billion year research and development period. What you find is that some of those animals and plants have evolved into specific niches.
There’s a beetle that can detect a forest fire 80 km away. Manmade fire detectors have a range of about eight metres and have to have a continuous connection of copper running all the way back to the power station burning fossil fuels, whereas this little beetle gets by on a few sips of water and a nibble of a leaf. This suggests that we still have a bit to learn. I tend to talk about biomimicry in three strands: natural forms, natural systems, and natural processes. The Eden Project was a good example of when looking at natural forms and their remarkable efficiency, structurally and materially, you can often come up with radically different and new solutions, for what is essentially a greenhouse.
Can you expand on the different strands of biomimicry?
Biomimicry is not just about the outward form, it’s about understanding what lies behind those systems and trying to mimic nature’s technology. We need a revolution of sorts and there are two big shifts that we need to make. One is a shift from a carbon economy to a solar economy, and the other is a shift from a linear wasteful way of using resources to a closed-loop model. At the base of those, biomimicry offers a huge range of examples that we can follow.
Translating biological systems to mechanical systems seems to have two major risks: a difference in scale, and our incomplete understanding of biology. How do you address these issues?
Most of the things that we’re doing on the Sahara Forest Project are basic biomimicry, but I think it’s achieving something successful. In other fields, like product design, you may have the research budget to get into depth, but on a building project you don’t often have the luxury to look into the processes in detail. For instance, some of the schemes have mimicked the ventilation systems of termite mounds, despite continued doubt about how these work, and have achieved great results, like in the Zimbabwe Eastgate Project (a passively-
cooled shopping centre and office building in Harare) where the building is naturally ventilated in a city that is mostly air-conditioned. They haven’t had to get into scientific detail in order to produce strategies that are environmentally better.
How do you tackle climate change issues?
In setting up Exploration Architecture I wanted to work in a different way to conventional practices. Sometimes brilliant clients come along, like Tim Smit of the Eden Project. But sometimes I was working on projects where the client may have already made some questionable decisions, like choosing the wrong site or setting the wrong brief, so from that point on it was just trying to make the best of a compromise. You could say that there are two ways to bring about change.
One is to work with reality and compromise and try to improve it. The other is to start with absurd idealism and compromise as little as possible. I feel that exemplar projects are much more influential than big projects. The idea was to work in a way that was closer to how other design disciplines work. Many product designers think, “I have this idea. I’m going to develop it and make it as good as I possibly can and then find a client for it”. That was the idea behind the Sahara Forest Project (SFP) – to develop and deploy an integrated, large-scale system for profitable production of food, fresh water, biofuels and electricity, generating restorative growth. It was about trying to create an ideal project and then find a client for it.
The Sahara Forest Project is a solution that could be funded in rich places like the United Arab Emirates, but in a turbulent African context, how do you see it empowering communities toward self sufficiency?
One of the criticisms directed at the Desertec Project (a German solar electricity super grid project in North Africa), is that it looks like a colonial land grab: grabbing bits of North Africa and taking the electricity to Northern Europe. What the SFP offers is benefits for local areas in terms of moving their agriculture beyond a subsistence level to a sustainable form of agriculture: benefits in terms of employment and re-vegetating deserts.
The intention is for the countries to produce their own food, not to produce food for Northern Europe. It would certainly be handy if we could have some of the energy, as David MacKay, in his book Without Hot Air, makes a case saying that we’re not going to be able to create all our own sustainable energy, so we need to hook up with other countries to do that. Although it’s a challenge, it’s a more optimistic and positive model than continuing with the fossil fuel economy.
But are you changing a dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on foreign sun?
I don’t see a problem trading with other countries. It’s not as secure as being completely self-sufficient, but self-sufficiency is not the most effective way to move on the project of humanity. In fact it’s likely to leave certain countries seriously disadvantaged. So it’s good to continue trading in commodities, just so long as they’re sustainable ones.
With drivers like sustainability and biomimicry, how does the form of your designs evolve?
What I’m interested in is working with current or near-term technologies and ideas to develop things that improve the quality of people’s lives. Architecture has to do a number of things: be uplifting, improve the quality of people’s lives and it should celebrate something of current importance. The SFP fits those criteria.
Could technologies also influence behaviour change?
Yes. There’s a lot of people within the sustainability debate saying that “it’s not A it’s B”, and someone else says “no it’s C”. It would be more helpful if people said that it’s all of those things but in certain circumstances we need B, and so on. It isn’t polarised. We need to reduce our use of energy and resource consumption and then de-carbonise the remaining energy demand. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Often environmentalists do the movement a disservice by talking about it in negative terms saying that it’s all about reducing and eliminating. What’s great about biomimicry is that it uses much more positive vocabulary. It talks about synergies and optimising, restorative development and abundance, and that gets people into a positive frame of mind.
While designing, which future do you think we need to plan for more urgently: peak oil leading to failures in our infrastructure and economic systems or climate change forcing population movement and world hunger?
I think peak oil will strike first. It could be that we react sensibly and really accelerate our efforts to get off oil. The less optimistic scenario is that we then start using all sorts of more carbon-intense forms of fuel like the oil tar sands and coal-to-liquid which would just increase carbon emissions. It’s very difficult to predict how things will play out.
To close on a positive note, there’s a quote from E F Schumacher: “We must do what we conceive to be right, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we’ll be successful. Because if we don’t do the right thing, we’ll do the wrong thing and we’ll be part of the disease and not part of the cure.”
by Sylvia Juzwa
From the Glass Archive – Issue Three – Promise
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