The Las Palmas Water Theatre – a desalination plant that takes the form of an outdoor amphitheatre – was inspired by the Namibian fog-basking beetle


How does biomimicry in architecture diff er from other sustainable approaches? The sustainability paradigm has often been about mitigation – how to make things less bad. In their book Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue that we need to get beyond that: it’s not enough to produce solutions that are less bad, we need models that are 100 per cent good. In the case of biomimicry, I think it’s pos- sible to move to a new paradigm, which is about restorative design. So while conven- tional human-made systems are generally extractive, linear, disconnected, wasteful and reliant on fossil fuels, biomimicry is about creating densely interconnected, zero-waste systems that rely on solar energy in a way that is actually restorative to the environment.


How much potential is there to apply the principles of biomimicry to leisure buildings? The potential defi nitely exists to use biomim- icry to solve functional challenges but at the same time to deliver secondary benefits.


CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 1


The Namibian fog-basking beetle creates its own fresh water in the desert


A good example is the Las Palmas Water Theatre in the Canary Islands, which I worked on at Grimshaw and which is actually a desal- ination plant. The key biomimicry idea came from the Namibian fog-basking beetle: you’ve got a cool surface, humid air passes over it and condensation forms. We tried to maximise that effect using the sunny conditions, steady


wind direction and cold seawater that are abundant in the Canaries. That drove the form of the building, but the evaporators and condensers were arranged in such a way that they created a backdrop for the creation of an outdoor amphitheatre. The Sahara Forest Project [a scheme that combines solar power technology and


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LAS PALMAS WATER THEATRE IMAGES: GRIMSHAW


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