Mick Pearce was born in Salisbury, now Harare, in 1938 and took his diploma with distinction at the Architectural Association in London in 1962. He has built in Britain, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia and China, and for four decades has worked almost entirely on one problem: how to condition a building without machinery. His method is biomimicry taken literally rather than decoratively — the ventilation logic of a termite mound, local materials, and old devices such as windmills in place of imported plant. The Eastgate Centre in Harare, completed in 1996 with the engineers Arup, is the demonstration piece, and uses roughly a tenth of the ventilation energy of a comparable air-conditioned building. He left Zimbabwe in 2000, co-designed Council House 2 in Melbourne, spent three years with Vanke in China and returned home in 2012.
