The Human Age (12 page)
There will soon come a time when farming needn’t have a country flavor, and referring to “the north forty” means crops forty floors up. PlantLab in the Netherlands grows forty different crops indoors, using hydroponics and high-tech sensors, without pesticides, and even without windows. Plants don’t need the whole spectrum of light; instead each crop is raised with the precise amount of blue or red light it craves. As the water evaporates, it’s recycled, so only a pittance extra is needed. In these specially controlled environments, the crop yield is three times higher than outdoors, and the process would do equally well in the Sahara or Siberia once LED lights become a bit cheaper.
All of our buildings need to earn their keep. We’re probably in the
last era of deadbeat buildings. In the United States alone, buildings use 40 percent of the country’s raw materials, burn 65 percent of the total electricity, and drain 12 percent of drinkable water, while piling up 136 million tons a year of demolition and construction wastes.
SUPPOSE THE GOAL
is buildings that are inherently living organisms. Just how alive could a home or office become? In addition to living walls and planted roofs, its skin could mimic plant metabolism and animal musculature. “Biomimicry” is an old idea but a dynamic and lucrative new direction in architecture and engineering that mines the genius of nature to find sustainable solutions to knotty human problems.
Picture: Houses painted with lotusin, a self-cleaning paint inspired by the water-shedding veneer of leaves. Products colored without pigments, echoing the way light dances across peacock and blue-jay feathers. New lenses and fiber optics that mimic the almost distortion-free lenses coating the body of a brittle sea star, or the flexible optics atop a sea sponge’s tentacles. Electronic devices inspired by mussel tissue, which automatically dissolve when you discard them. A building whose outer skin resembles the porelike stomata of leaves and provides all the energy it needs. Ships’ hulls engineered like whale skin to glide through the water while burning less fuel, and airplane wings that save fuel by mimicking ripple-edged whale fins.
The result is organic, self-assembling, nonpolluting solutions that nature has already mastered and we can copy. This frame of mind requires a major flip in our way of thinking and our sense of how we exist in nature. For the longest time, “heat, beat, and treat” was the industrial motto. We’ve built cities and fueled empires by raiding the Earth’s resources, chopping them up, heating them, breaking them down with toxic chemicals, and fastening them together. Biomimicry asks: “Okay, that’s how humans make things—and it doesn’t work. How does
life
make things?”
“Organisms have figured out ways to do the miraculous things they do,” the biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus says, “without jeopardizing the future of their resources and offspring.”
Inspired by Benyus and others, cities are blooming with architecture that functions like (and sometimes resembles) growing organisms. Imagine transparent skyscrapers that save energy as their facades expand and contract like an elaborate array of muscles. In a working prototype designed by the New York firm Decker Yeadon, swirling silver ribbons in the glass facade are really a three-layered muscle: a rubbery polymer sheathing a flexible polymer core, with a silver coating that skittles an electrical charge across the surface. If it’s too cold, the ribbon-muscles “fire” and contract to slender squiggles, exposing lots of window to the sun. In hot weather, the ribbons expand like a patchwork of shot silk to create a flat parasol of shade. Many small segments self-regulate in this way, fiddling with their own thermostat to stay in homeostasis. Much as we do. Too warm? Shed the sweater and move out of the direct sun. As a design, muscular walls are more flexible and stronger than solar panels.
Or picture the high-rise office and shopping complex Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, which was inspired by a throng of gigantic termite towers. Topped by turrets and pinnacles, a city of vaulted termite mounds can rise thirty feet from the parched earth like otherworldly castles, while millions of laborers and soldiers toil inside, presided over by king and queen, with offspring raised communally. It’s an agricultural society, whose favorite crop is a fungus that will only grow at 87°F. Yet outside the thick mud walls, temperatures can plunge to near freezing at night and soar to broiling by day. Winds snort and snap one moment and tap like weary ghosts the next. Our windmills and wind turbines require a steady flow of wind, and they’re stymied by turbulence. Termite engineers harness chaotic winds far more skillfully by using their mounds as inside-out lungs.
Deep inside each mountainous city, termites capture and trim even the most sputtering, heat-whipped, muddled winds to the precise
vibration needed to ventilate the colony and keep their crops flourishing. As they open and close a filigree of low doors, the mound inhales a rush of air into a maze of chambers and passageways, and shoots it up to the buttresses and tiptop chimneys. They keep tweaking their design by opening and closing doors, digging new doors, sealing old ones, adding wet mud in spots for quicker cooling. Each termite is like one neuron in a collective brain. It doesn’t need to be smart, and none can see the whole picture, but together they create coherent action and a kind of intelligence. Constant gardeners, they fine-tune the breeze and provide a steady temperature, which keeps the tiny, blind population cozy.
We have this in common: they are great openers of doors, as we are, though their doors are physical and many of ours are symbolic. Some of their blade-shaped “compass” mounds are oriented toward the sun at a time-tested angle to avoid the roasting noonday sun, yet usher in evening’s faint rays. My house was designed on the same principle by its first owner—vaulted south-facing windows in the living room let in more winter sun and provide summer shade.
Singing can draw oxygen through even injured lungs, and the mud colony fills with a vibrato, reassuring its lodgers that all is well. On some level unknown to us, an out-of-tune mound must not sound right to the termites, who are driven to build the most exquisite lungs possible because their lives depend on it. Does this mean they have an aesthetics that’s shared by the whole colony? Who’s to say. It could be that, to them, out-of-tune air stings like a million arrows.
Inspired by mud casts of the mound’s baroque nooks and crannies, the African architect Mick Pearce designed the Eastgate Centre. Fans on the first floor spirit air through ducts into the central spine of the building, and stale air seeps through exhaust vents on each floor, exiting at last from high chimneys. A river of fresh air automatically replaces it. Using only 10 percent as much energy as nearby buildings, the eco-friendly Centre has saved the owners $3.5 million in climate control, which they’ve passed on to their tenants
by lowering the rent. Ten years later, Pearce built the even more efficient ten-story Council House 2 building in Melbourne, Australia. This time, recycled wooden shutters, covering one whole side of the building, open like petals at night to expel the warm air from offices and shops. This works well in Africa, but in colder climes excess warmth can’t be wasted. And so, in some countries, furnaces now have two legs.
H
ow intimate, how romantic, how sustainable of the French. As I waited with a throng of Parisians in Paris’s Rambuteau subway station on a blustery November day, my frozen toes finally began to thaw. Alone we may have shivered, but together we brewed so much body heat that people began unbuttoning their dark coats. We might have been emperor penguins crowding for warmth in Antarctica’s icy torment of winds.
Idly mingling, a human body radiates about 100 watts of excess heat, which can add up fast in confined spaces. Rushing commuters contribute even more, and heat also looms from the friction of trains on the tracks and seeps from the deep maze of tunnels, raising the platform temperature to around 70°F, almost a geothermal spa. As new people clambered on and off trains, and trickled up and down the staircases to Rue Beaubourg, their haste kept the communal den toasty.
Geothermal warmth may abound in volcanic Iceland, but it’s not easy to come by in downtown Paris. So why waste it? Instead mine people as a renewable green energy source. Tap even a fraction of the population, say, the heat cloud of subway commuters, and
it’s a deep pocketful of free energy. In that spirit, savvy architects from Paris Habitat decided to borrow the surplus energy from all the hurrying bodies in the metro station and convert it into radiant underfloor heating for apartments in a nearby social housing project, which happens to share an unused stairwell with the station. Otherwise the heat borne through countless rushed breakfasts of croissant and café au lait, mind-theaters, idle reveries, and flights of boredom would be lost by the end of the morning rush hour. Opportunity warms.
Appealing as the design may be, it isn’t feasible throughout Paris without a pricey retrofit of buildings and metro stops. But it’s proving successful elsewhere. In America, there’s Minnesota’s prairielike monument to capitalism, the four-million-square-foot Mall of America. Even on subzero winter days the indoor temperature skirts 70°F from combined body heat, light fixtures, and sunlight cascading in through 1.2 miles of skylights. That’s just as well, since people can get married in the mall’s Chapel of Love on the third floor, next to Bloomingdale’s, and taffeta and chiffon aren’t the best insulators.
Or consider Scandinavia’s busiest travel hub, Stockholm’s Central Station, during morning rush hour on a blustery day in January. Outside, it’s -7°F, the streets are icy as a toboggan run, cold squirrels around your face, the air feels scratchy, and even in wool mittens your hands are tusks of ice. But indoors is another country, a temperate one filled with a living mass of humans heading in all directions. Pocketing the windfall, engineers are harnessing the body heat issuing from 250,000 railway travelers to help warm the thirteen-story Kungsbrohuset office building about a hundred yards away. Under the voluminous roof of the station, travelers donate their 100 watts of surplus natural heat, while visitors bustle around the dozens of shops, buying meals, drinks, books, flowers, cosmetics, and such, bestowing even more energy.
You can almost feel a gentle tugging at your skin. There’s a warm draft.
“Why shouldn’t we use it?” asks Klas Johansson, who works for
Jernhusen, the state-owned developer of the project. “If we don’t use it it’s just going to be ventilated away.”
Citizen lamplighters, citizen furnace-stokers—antique corps of volunteers fill my imagination. All cheap and renewable. This ultragreen design works dramatically well in Sweden, a land of soaring fuel costs, ecologically minded citizens, and a legendary arctic winter becalmed by few hours of daylight and a horizon-hugging sun. Night blankets the city in stellar darkness by midafternoon. Offset as the night may be with cozy lantern-lit streets, candle-lit windows, and the luminous green ribbons and dancing halos of the northern lights, when cold clambers up the bones, more heat is the sole comfort. But fuel can take many forms, from fossil to solar energy, oil and gas to the residue left in paper mills, or Central Station’s . . . well, what shall we call it? As a technology it needs a catchy name, something sociable. Maybe “Auraglow,” “Beradiant,” “EnsnAired,” or “FriendEnergy”?
The design of heat recycling works like this: first the station’s ventilation system captures the commuters’ body heat, which it uses to warm water in underground tanks. From there, the hot water is pumped to Kungsbrohuset’s pipes, covering a third of its fuel needs per year. Kungsbrohuset’s design has other sustainable elements as well. The windows, angled to allow in maximum sunlight during the winter, also block the fiercest rays in summer. Fiber optics whisper daylight from the roof into dark stairwells and other nonwindowed spaces, where lazy buildings would need to pay for electricity. In summer, bone-chilling lake water flows through the veins of the building. If you can’t cool off regularly by dunking in the lake, at least you can enjoy a sort of dry plunge.
Part of the appeal of heating buildings with body heat is the delicious simplicity of finding a new way to use old technology (just people, pipes, pumps, and water). It’s worth noting that the buildings can’t be more than two hundred feet apart, or too much heat would be lost in transit. The essential ingredient is a reliable flux of people scuttling to and fro each day to tender the heat, so the design only
works in high-traffic areas. Perhaps, on low-volume days, children might be invited to use the space as a gym for high-energy sports.
“Be a joule,” the Public Service billboards for EnsnAired heating might urge, noting in fine print: “A person radiates about 350,000 joules of energy per hour, and since 1 watt equals 1 joule per second, one person can effortlessly illumine the darkening world with the energy of a 100-watt lightbulb. A city of 2.25 million people can light 22,500 lamps.” Linger with that image for a moment—a multitude of lamps, each one sparkling, but together providing a great cloak of light. Paraphrasing a proverb attributed to Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, it might say: “It’s better to become one lightbulb than to curse the darkness.”
Widening their vision to embrace neighborhoods, Jernhusen engineers talk of finding a way to capture excess body heat on a scale large enough to warm homes and office buildings in a perpetual cycle of mutual generosity. Heat generated by people at home at night would be piped to office buildings first thing in the morning, and then heat shed in the offices during the day would flow to the residences in the late afternoon. Nature is full of life-giving cycles; why not add this renewable human one?
In this Golden Rule technology of neighbor helping neighbor, we would all share heat from the tiny campfires in our cells—what could be more selfless? Just by walking briskly, or mousing around the shops, you can stoke the heat in someone’s chilly kitchen. Possibly a friend’s, but not necessarily. I’ll warm your apartment today, you’ll warm my schoolroom tomorrow. It’s effective and homely as gathering together in a cave. Sometimes there’s nothing like an old idea revamped.