"All of my work is motivated by frustration with the word 'sustainable.' The word suggests something that is merely adequate, but we should be looking for truly regenerative solutions. We have moved from controlling nature to learning from its elements, but today we should be looking for complete reconciliation with the natural world."
Michael PAWLYN
Michael Pawlyn is a British architect and one of today’s leading ecological architects who practice biomimicry. His biomimetic architectural designs are inspired by the genius of nature, not just its forms but above all its processes, the functioning of its ecosystems, which are complex and richly regenerative in contrast to current human systems, which are linear and extractive. Pawlyn pushes architectural practice beyond the concept of “sustainability” and proposes a bold set of regenerative principles that have the potential to transform the way we design, create and manage our buildings, infrastructure and communities. He is also known for initiating the “Architects Declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency” movement in the UK in 2018, which inspired over 6,000 companies in 26 countries to sign up to the declaration. As a central member of the Grimshaw Architects team, he was involved in a radical transformation of the garden architecture of the Eden Project in Cornwall in 1999-2001, where he designed geodesic dome structures composed of hexagons and pentagons inspired by carbon molecules, the shapes of sea urchins and dragonfly wings, for the biome designs of the warm and humid tropics; the domes, which are unusually light, are self-heating, using passive solar principles. In 2007, Pawlyn founded Exploration Architecture and has established a reputation as a leader in the field of biomimetic architecture. He lectures widely internationally on biomimicry and innovative approaches to sustainability.
In 2007, he spoke at Google's annual Zeitgeist conference, and in 2011, he became one of the few architects to have his talk published on TED.com. That same year, Pawlyn's book Biomimicry in Architecture, published by the Royal Institute of British Architects, which paves the way for a positive future designed to function like nature. Pawlyn is one of the founders of The Sahara Forest project (2013) in Qatar, which proposes a way to supply the arid desert landscape with fresh water, food and renewable energy. In 2022, he published a book with Sarah Ichioky Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency. This conversation was led by Biomimicry Institute Director Megan Schuknecht with Michael Pawlyn on July 30, 2017. Translation: Jiří Zemánek.
Megan: Is there any surprising thing about climate change that most people don't know?
Michael: It always seems a little absurd to me when I meet real estate agents in London who insist that buildings must be air-conditioned and that rising temperatures will make this requirement even more urgent. When they say this, I remind them of the example of the Eastgate Centre office building, which is quite close to the equator and operates without air conditioning.1
Megan: What are the three most important areas that need to be addressed to truly impact climate change?
Michael: Many people would argue that it's renovations of existing buildings, and I think that's a pretty strong argument because in the UK we only renovate about one percent of our building stock every year, which means that a large proportion of the buildings that will be standing by 2040 or 2050 are the ones that already exist. And by 2040 or 2050 we need to almost completely decarbonize our economy and our built environment. So it's clear how big a task it is, and of course the sooner we do it the better. So it's definitely one of the big tasks that lies ahead.
Another thing is that I am constantly frustrated by the slow pace of change. We have almost all the solutions we need to make buildings much more efficient, whether they are new builds or existing buildings, and yet these things are simply not being implemented. And that is a serious problem. The construction industry in the UK is becoming more and more conservative, while the context we are designing for is increasingly demanding radical change.
All aspects of transport and public space in cities need to be urgently rethought. This can and should have a major impact on tackling climate change, and fortunately, most of the changes we need to make will actually improve people's quality of life. So it shouldn't be too much of a problem to make these changes. The changes I have in mind, of course, are moving away from single-occupancy cars and towards much more sustainable forms of transport - walking, cycling and public transport.
Megan: Is there a nature-inspired solution that gives you hope regarding climate change?
Michael: One of the projects we're working on, which is probably the most radical in its own way, is called the Biorock Pavilion. The starting point for the climatologists' thinking was the graphs from the Vostok ice core. Everyone is focusing on the part of it that shows how CO2 and temperature have been increasing exponentially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. People have been focusing on this part of the graph for good reason, because it seems alarming. But in many ways, I find the previous part of the graph more interesting, because it shows how CO2 levels and temperatures have been in a relatively stable range for almost half a million years and probably much longer, which raises the question of what control mechanism has maintained this balance?
The most convincing explanation I've heard on this subject is that of James Lovelock's Gaia theory, which says that coccolithophores and other marine microorganisms boomed during periods of higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, building their skeletons partly from carbon in the form of calcium carbonate dissolved in the ocean. Because coccolithophores are relatively short-lived and fall to the ocean floor as "ocean rain" when they die, they build up layers of limestone, thereby transferring carbon from the atmosphere to the lithosphere, restoring the balance. It would seem that one way biology could help solve the problem of climate change is to make more things from atmospheric carbon.
So we started looking at the idea of how we could grow materials. Wood is an obvious example. But biorock appealed to us because it allows for greater control over the forms you can create. It's a way of growing structures in seawater using electrodeposition of minerals. These are mainly calcium carbonate and magnesium hydroxide. It's simple - you put a steel frame in seawater, through which a very low level of electric current passes, completely safe for wildlife, and minerals start to deposit on this steel frame quite quickly. After about a year, the frame can be 20-25 mm thick and can be as strong as reinforced concrete. So we proposed that an entire building could be grown this way.
We're also looking at other ways to make materials from atmospheric carbon. There's some really interesting stuff that Neri Oxman is doing at MIT, which is basically 3D printing with bio-based polymers. If we could really scale this up as a product, then we'd be doing what we really need to do, which is take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into building materials.
Megan: So you made the Biorock pavilion using mineral deposition technology?
Michael: Not yet. We've experimented with Biorock in our Saharan Forest project in Qatar, where we grew some of the structural elements. And we've created a design for a Biorock pavilion, but we haven't gotten that far yet to actually make prototypes.
Megan: Going back to what you said earlier – I think you were basically suggesting that we also need a change in mindset; the science is there, but you're frustrated that we're not implementing things faster. Do you think biomimicry can play a role in supporting the implementation of existing solutions?
Michael: Yes, it does, and probably in many ways. But the way that comes to mind most often is how biomimicry helps tell compelling stories. And I don't mean that in a disparaging way. Storytelling is becoming more and more important, in other words, its importance is becoming more and more obvious. We've learned in recent years that there are a lot of people who just don't care about data. You can talk to them about numbers until they're crazy, but it's not going to change their minds. So you have to communicate with them on a slightly different level. I've found that biomimicry can be very useful in this context, in that you can start by telling a story about a biological organism that's doing something fantastic, and then you can show how that solution can be translated into something that meets human needs. For example, I would stand up in front of an audience and say, "This thing is called the Sahara Forest Project, and our plan is to produce water in the desert, turn it into a green landscape, and produce energy," and so on. I think most people would fold their arms, look at their watch, and think, "How long is this guy going to keep talking?" But when I start describing how a mist-bathing beetle gets water, people immediately get hooked and lean forward and say, "Well, if a beetle can do it, we should be able to do it too, because humans are geniuses, right?" I've found that biomimicry can be very useful for capturing attention and getting people over a certain threshold of skepticism and into a new way of looking at things.
Megan: But do you have any advice on how to get more people involved in solving climate change problems? We could narrow it down to your own sphere. That is, how to get more people in the construction industry involved in solving climate change issues.
Michael: I always try to get people excited about the positive possibilities, rather than depressing them with the bleak reality. The truth is, we need a little bit of both. But at least in this country, people have heard all the bleak stuff. They know that biodiversity is plummeting, they know that climate change is happening. What we need is a much more lively conversation about solutions. In my lectures and when I teach students, I always try to get people to think positively about how they can shape the future. So instead of thinking about the future as something that's just going to happen to you, think about it as something that you can actually create. It's like Hans Rosling says that we shouldn't be optimists or pessimists, because both of those attitudes assume a certain sense of inevitability. You should be a serious "possibilist." You should decide what kind of future you want, and then go about creating it, and do it thoughtfully. I think this kind of call to action addresses one of the problems, which is that a lot of people – it's less students, but there are some students – are a little bit apathetic about how to grasp something and how to make it happen.
Megan: In this regard, we work with a lot of young people who are very excited about the possibilities of reshaping the world. However, they don't always know how to cope with these new possibilities, how to process them, or how to maintain their enthusiasm in the face of doing things in a completely different way and becoming young inventors or young entrepreneurs. Do you have any specific advice for these young biomimics?
Michael: To the second edition of his book Biomimicry in Architecture (Biomimicry in architecture) I included an extended tutorial on how to actually apply biomimicry. One of the things I tell students and architects is that when we engage in biomimetic approaches, we can run into difficulties, especially when we try to mimic the ecosystem level. It can be really complex, and there is often a strong temptation to go back to something that is simpler and more familiar to us. I have noticed this particularly with ecosystem models, where you are trying to synergize a number of different elements, so that the output for one element becomes the input for something else. In reality, you have quite a few interconnected flows and interdependencies, and sometimes it is quite difficult to figure out what happens when one link in the chain is broken. There is a beautiful quote from the writer Ben Okri, who said, “Misfortune is not the end of the story. Where there is courage and conviction, it is the beginning of a new story, richer than the story that came before.” So when difficulties arise, I always advise people to try to use the same level of ingenuity and imagination that they had when they started, instead of feeling defeated. Think about what you can add to the system to solve the problem, instead of simplifying the system.
A good example is the Biorock story. In the Sahara Forest project in Qatar, one of the key inputs to the whole system is seawater. We were told that our seawater pipes would become very quickly fouled with scale, and our industrial partner told us that they would have to use a lot of bleach to keep the pipes clean. We thought that sounded crazy, but they really did think it was a problem. So we started thinking about it. Scale itself is not a problem, it's a pretty hard and useful material. It just forms in the wrong place. So we came up with the idea of growing actual structural elements in the marine pipelines that the project supplies using biorock. This would remove the scale from the seawater, which would accumulate on these steel structural elements rather than on the pipes themselves. Then the seawater in the downstream pipes would be slightly more acidic, which would be enough to prevent scale from forming on the rest of the pipes.
An accidental discovery was that the Biorock process also releases a very small amount of chlorine into the water, enough to suppress biofouling, which was another concern in terms of pipe clogging. There was something very nice about being able to grow elements for the expansion project inside the pipes that the project supplies. And it turned out that through imaginative problem-solving, we were able to add a significant new element to the system.
Comment
- Eastgate Centre is a shopping mall and office building in central Harare, Zimbabwe, designed by architect Mick Pearce. Pearce conceived the building as a metaphor for a living ecosystem, inspired by termite mounds, and ventilated and cooled entirely by nature, making it possibly the first building in the world to use natural cooling at this level. ↩︎