Photo via flickr by justin

By listening to termites with microphones buried deep inside mounds, the aim is to develop rapid prototype technologies to mass-manufacture future green habitats.

“Termites are the best examples of housebuilders in the natural world,” says Rupert Soar, a builder-turned-scientist. The mounds take in fresh air and expel waste gases through walls that “breathe,” he explains, and if humans could replicate that in our buildings, it would significantly reduce the need for air conditioning and other electricity-guzzling ventilation systems.

Via Financial Times

Moving forward, we should think about habitats as organisms. Because in the future, architecture will be programmable. It will morph, respond, and feed-in-and-out like real creatures. The emergence of ecological systems thinking, combined with information technologies, calls for living shelter. Adaptive, semi-permeable materials that respond like sensitive skins. Pro-active buildings that can change shape real-time in relation to the sun. Housing that can breathe, harnessing the power of the wind. As architecture becomes an integrative part of nature, we will begin to see houses not as “containers,” but as complex, self-organizing living systems. And as we increasingly move off-planet, our days of man-in-the-can ventures into the sky and space pod living will be over. We will engineer our biosphere in the stars and create greenhouses 100 feet high so that people and animals can walk right in. Inextricably linked to our new intergalactic terraform, replanted and original.