The concept driving the design of the Water Research Center of the University of the Free State in South Africa is known as bio-mimicry, learning from nature’s regulating processes to inspire an understanding of architecture in sync with the environment. Architecture, according to the project’s author, can mimic the mechanisms at work in nature to produce architectural structures that can sustain themselves, while in symbiosis with nature. 

The project aims to amalgamate the land mass and bodies of water with a dam constructed on existing pillars to form a hybrid landscape. The building evolves into a kind of living creature or organism with a roof-like structure opening or closing according to the seasonal rainfall. 

Borderline mediated landscape is a Water Research Centre for the University of the Free State (QwaQwa campus).

The first traces of architecture are linked to Marc-Antoine Laugier’s reference to the primitive hut where the shelter and the skin act as a refuge, a wall offering protection from the outside world. In nature, the skins of plants and animals are much more sophisticated – they are able to regulate temperature, generate energy and adapt to change. By exploring nature’s design and introducing biomimicry (the act of mimicking or copying biology) the obvious clues in nature can be applied to architecture which will ultimately result in the creation of a hybrid building: a building that is self-sustaining and adaptive to its surroundings.

The site structure (Fika Patso Dam) was constructed in 1986 to provide water to the surrounding communities of the Eastern Free State. The site now consumed by a vast landscape of water, covering the entire valley is in contrast with its lost space which has no connection with past or present; a pause in space and time. This led to the idea of spatial reawakening through the medium of architecture. According to Tadao Ando – “The presence of architecture: regardless of its self-contained character – inevitably creates a new landscape. This implies the necessity of discovering the architecture which the site itself is seeking.”

This project explores whether nature and architecture can amalgamate to become a hybrid solution in a vast landscape which has lost its reference to place and time. The transformation of place and time through architecture results in a progressive fusion giving meaning to a certain non-place lacking character and special qualities and resulting in an awakened space.

Architecture should become a space within which nature can grow and become part of the symbiosis called life. When the colliding systems are fused, a coherent typology emerges; juxtaposing the forgotten space and creating a tabula rasa where the non-place can be reactivated resulting in a spatial awakening.

The architecture connects with nature and the context in such a way that the building actually moves as the seasons change. The design makes use of surface tension from the water to force the building to open and close depending on the seasonal rainfall. When the water level is at its lowest the skin of the structure will open and change as the seasons change, becoming a living organism.