Mr Resilience
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FEATURE The design of Eastgate in Harare was inspired by termite mounds. Mr Resilience Committed to appropriate architecture, Mick Pearce specialises in buildings that have low maintenance, low capital and running costs, and renewable energy systems of environmental control. Matt Dillon and Phil Wilkinson spoke to Pearce on the eve of his appearance at the Melbourne Pre-loved Buildings conference. Sitting in a sunlit office on the 51st level Pearce is forever searching out ways to and it uses 35 per cent less energy than of Melbourne Central Tower, trailblazing make buildings work more efficiently. six conventional buildings in Harare architect Mick Pearce is explaining why Referring to himself as a “designer” combined. In the first five years, the he isn’t particularly fond of the word rather than an architect, he happily building saved its owner $3.5 million “sustainability”. He prefers the term absorbs knowledge from any discipline in costs.” “resilience”. he thinks might be helpful – engineering, biology, entomology. He reads widely. Ecolibrium: Have you always been “There’s this whole problem of interested in ecologically sustainable this conservatism surrounding it The building most closely associated with design? [sustainability],” says Zimbabwe-born Pearce is Eastgate, a mixed office complex Pearce, 71. “It implies keeping things as and shopping mall covering half a city MP: What got me going in the they are. And there’s this whole mix-up block in the business centre of Harare sustainable direction was a guy called with economic sustainability. Everybody that was inspired, incredibly, by termite Bill Mollison, an Australian who is using this word ‘sustainability’. In mounds. invented permaculture (Ed’s note: along the corporate world it’s come to mean with David Holgrem and associates). “What makes it unique is that not only is ‘staying in the black’. Permaculture mimics the rainforest. it ventilated, cooled and heated entirely Plants support each other; you can “Then you have the term ‘sustainable through natural means, but it works,” actually grow crops without fertiliser. development’, which in a funny sort of wrote Liane Lefaivre and Alexander way is an oxymoron. I don’t like it. I Tzonis of Architects for Peace. “Its In Harare in about 1986 Mollison gave use ‘resilience’, actually. That’s what I’m ventilation costs one-tenth that of a a lecture that I went to, in a building trying to do anyway.” comparable air-conditioned building that I’d built. And he was marvellous. 26 Ecoli bri u m • OC TOBe R 20 0 9 Hi-Res PDF - GOOD For Print �I�N O�� BO� ��D ��M A�D FEATURE buildings that needed as little electrical power as possible. Zimbabwe has a beautiful climate of hot days and cold nights. It’s subtropical, about 15° south, with an altitude of 1,500m, so it’s quite cool at night and hot during the day because of the thinner atmosphere. So you get a big diurnal shift, which is the difference between the day and the night. We found that building courtyards with plants in them helped because they trapped the cold air. And if you put plants in them you could actually drop the ambient temperature. And therefore you can save huge amounts of energy by sucking that air into the air conditioners. In fact, the air conditioning units we put in really didn’t Mick Pearce run half the time. Also, we were worried much more about He said completely the things that I the sun shielding. The buildings that had wanted to hear – we were absolutely in been built didn’t have any sun shielding, tune. I thought perhaps that one could they were just glass towers. That in the do with architecture as permaculture radiation belt was madness, just crazy. had done [with plants]. In other words, ® My buildings were the first to have mimic the processes in nature. That would EC plug fan serious solar shielding on the outside. give you an intellectual basis for building design. And then I started doing office And then we go to the point where a client blocks, university buildings and schools. asked me to build one huge building without any air conditioning. He said, So little research and “We just can’t afford to go on importing “ air conditioning.” And that was Eastgate. development is done The next on buildings, anywhere. We formed a team, using the London and Harare Arup offices to design a building We spend more human which used night air to cool itself. energy designing We devised this system of laying night air bloody corkscrews than through voids in the structure – channels step. buildings. Buildings are under the floor and things like that – so always in a rush. there’s that the structure would then be cooled enormous pressure to down and return that coolth and then cool the air the next day before it went Innovation – new 6kW, get buildings up” into the room. high efficiency air I did about four in a row, and each time Eco: Was Eastgate the building that was we went further down the track, getting said to be based on termite mounds? handling technology. more and more sustainable. We found MP: I had watched a David that most buildings in Harare used the Attenborough documentary about international style. One thought that the termites. I told the engineers this, and it universal style could be built anywhere, started as a joke. But then it became more and that all you needed was power. That’s serious because I realised it was a good what architecture was all about: that metaphor for the building. nature could be conquered by the city. You could just plug into the power station The interesting thing about the termite and there was endless energy. mounds in Zimbabwe (the ones here work on a different principle) are that All of that, that line of thinking, fell apart they are chimneys. At night the chimney The engineer’s choice. in the Third World, in Africa. Certainly works because it’s hotter inside than I couldn’t do that architecture in Africa outside. The more air rushes up the because there was no technology. It was spout, the more oxygen gets in, and so very primitive. And secondly energy was their activity increases. A beehive works www.ebmpapst.com.au more and more expensive, particularly in on a similar principle, except they cool central Africa. You were forced to design the air by fanning their wings. Ph: 1800 764 440 oOrC TO B e(03)R 20 0 9 9360• Ecoli br 6400i u M 27 DATE. 03.19.2009 JOB NO. REV. CLIENT. JOB NAME. 021453r02_EBMP_EC Plug Fan Ad FEATURE So you get this amazing picture of activity desert, very dry, and then it switches and And we used the night air for cooling the at night, all based on oxygen. They also you get these cold winds off the Southern building water. All of the cooled water have evaporative cooling, because they Ocean, and it switches from about 40°C goes straight to the phase change. We used moisture from the water table, and to about 18°C in half an hour. should have much more phase change – evaporate the air that comes in, and that double the amount. We wanted to, but Eco: Does that mean the low-tech drops the temperature. solutions suitable for Africa won’t couldn’t afford it. They keep the air temperature in a very work here? CH2 is the usual story of pioneering narrow band, about 30-31°C inside all the MP: In order to squash the thermal everything. We’ve given them a Rolls time. And the outside temperature goes temperatures into the comport band you Royce, because they’ve got everything, from 0 to 40°C. need much more thermal storage than and the conditions in there are just We thought that there’s got to be a way can be achieved with rock stores. [With ridiculously good. The range of of mimicking the termites, and we got CH2] we tried a big container of water. temperature is literally just 1°C. It’s better quite excited about this. It remained the We got 4,500 cubic litres of water, which than an A-grade building. metaphor for the building right the way is just out of the question. So little research and development is through the design process. So we had a different set of problems. done on buildings, anywhere. We spend And then I mentioned this to a journalist We devised many systems, high-tech more human energy designing bloody when we walking past the buildings and solutions. We had phase-change material. corkscrews than buildings. Buildings looking up at the chimneys on tops of it. Phase change is a way of storing energy, are always in a rush. There’s enormous He said, “What on Earth are those?” I which is so much better and doesn’t need pressure to get buildings up. There are said, “Well actually there not chimneys, as much as space as doing it with water, vast amounts of money at stake, and they’re vents that let the night air out.” rocks or the building structure. everything else. And then I told him about the termites. What we did here that we couldn’t do Eco: Why do you call yourself a designer He cooked up a story that was in the New in Harare is night purging. Because the rather “architect” or some other title? York Times the next day. The whole thing temperature drops lower than what it just went “boom”! would do in Harare, what you do is open MP: This line of architecture is driven by That story kind of put me on the map a bit, the windows.