What termites teach about buildings & jobs

Indeed, while landmark, one-off buildings might generate headlines for the new technology, the key goal is to transfer the printing process from the production line to the residential building lot, making houses available in less time, at much less expense and with more extraordinary designs than are currently available. "Mass printing of houses could be quite cheap, fast and specific," El-Ali says. "We are taking this technology quite seriously and putting it forward to clients. You can build whatever you want for the same price as a standard house."

For many, the dream is also to make houses more eco-friendly. Soar's belief that we should live like termites, for example, might sound fantastical but it is, in fact, embraced by builders and architects all over the world. They are enthralled: first, by the scale of the mounds relative to the insects (one overused clich is that if termites were the size of humans their structures would be many times higher than the Empire State Building) and, second, by the internal environmental controls that Soar is studying. Indeed, the ventilation of buildings including London's Swiss Re office tower (also known as the Gherkin), Serpentine Gallery and Portcullis House and the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe used termite mounds as inspiration.

Building on work by the American evolutionary scientist Scott Turner and Namibian entomologist Eugene Marais, Soar thinks that previous models for how the nests got their air missed the point. Rather than working like the "stack effect" of a chimney - where wind blowing over the top creates a vacuum that sucks out hot air - he and his research partners think it operates like a lung, mixing gases through intricately porous walls. "We have identified respiratory systems in a pile of mud," he says. And, by scanning and copying the structures via rapid manufacturing, he hopes to "capture a technology that keeps a swarm [of termites] in a constant state without electricity" - no pumps, no fans, no air conditioning. This is particularly relevant for houses, since most are too short to take advantage of controlling their climate through chimneys.