African Termite Mounds Reveal a Green Building Design

African termite mound and Eastgate center in Zimbabwe

What you can see in the above picture is the Eastgate Center Building in Harare, Zimbabwe. It can be considered as a perfect example for the concept of ‘green building design’. They do not utilize a regular air-conditioning system, but they have been cooling their building since their very first days, using an unnatural, but in a very nature-friendly manner.

What is the secret?

The reason(..or the secret) is that it uses passive cooling system ( ..technology which is used to cool buildings without any power utilization ) which mimics the cooling technique used within African termite mounds.

The insects do this by constantly opening and closing vents throughout the mound to manage convection currents of air – cooler air is drawn in from open lower sections while hot air escapes through chimneys

By incorporating this technology into the building, they have managed to cut down the huge amounts of energy that would have utilized, because now the whole system consumes less than 10% of the energy of a conventional building with a similar size . That means a pretty small low power usage…. hence the saving are big. ..Now the owners of the Eastgate Center are reporting that they have been able to save millions of dollars with this brilliant green building design. Big enough for little termite. isn’t it….