  Photosynthesis is arguably the fundamental process of Life, since it enables
energy from the Sun to enter the food-chain on Earth. It is a remarkable
non-equilibrium process in which photons are converted to many-body excitations
which traverse a complex biomolecular membrane, getting captured and fueling
chemical reactions within a reaction-center in order to produce nutrients. The
precise nature of these dynamical processes -- which lie at the interface
between quantum and classical behaviour, and involve both noise and
coordination -- are still being explored. Here we focus on a striking recent
empirical finding concerning an illumination-driven transition in the
biomolecular membrane architecture of {\it Rsp. Photometricum} purple bacteria.
Using stochastic realisations to describe a hopping rate model for excitation
transfer, we show numerically and analytically that this surprising shift in
preferred architectures can be traced to the interplay between the excitation
kinetics and the reaction center dynamics. The net effect is that the bacteria
profit from efficient metabolism at low illumination intensities while using
dissipation to avoid an oversupply of energy at high illumination intensities.
