IN THE heart of Africa’s savannah lies a city that is a model of sustainable development. Its buttressed towers are built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials. Its inhabitants live and work in quarters that are air-conditioned and humidity-regulated, without consuming a single watt of electricity. Water comes from wells that dip deep into the earth, and food is cultivated self-sufficiently in gardens within its walls. This metropolis is not just eco-friendly: with its curved walls and graceful arches, it is rather beautiful too.
This is no human city, of course. It is a termite mound.
Unlike termites and other nest-building insects, we humans pay little attention to making buildings fit for their environments. “We can develop absurd architectural ideas without the punishment of natural selection,” says architect Juhani Pallasmaa of the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. As we wake up to climate change and resource depletion, though, interest in how insects manage their built environments is reawakening. It appears we have a lot to learn.
“The building mechanisms and the design principles that make the properties of insect nests possible aren’t well understood,” says Guy Théraulaz of the CNRS Research Centre on Animal Cognition in Toulouse, France. That’s not for want of trying. Research into termite mounds kicked off in the 1960s, when Swiss entomologist Martin Lüscher made trailblazing studies of nests created by termites of the genus Macrotermes on the plains of southern Africa. It was he who suggested the chaotic-looking mounds were in fact exquisitely engineered eco-constructions.
Specifically, he proposed an intimate connection between how the mounds are built …