Bee Modern

Although humans had long exploited bees for their honey, traditional beekeeping relied until the 19th century on the use of “rustic” or “traditional” beehives, which entailed the annual removal of the honeycomb, and thus the destruction of the bees. Modern apiculture was born with the blind Swiss naturalist François Huber (1750-1831), who made important discoveries about bees and invented the first rational beehive. Built with hinged frames, Huber’s “leaf beehive” unfolded like a book, allowing the beekeeper to both harmlessly extract the honey and observe the hive in its totality. The technical developments in the second half of the 19th century were progressive improvements on this model, and included the observation beehive with a glass window, and the removeable-frame beehive by the American Lorrain Langstroth (1810-1895), still a fun-damental principle of beehive design. These inventions both afforded and were produced by an appropriation of the beehive as a metaphor for a perfect society, a fascination crystallized by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck in his famous 1902 essay, The Life of Bees.

Key to diagram

1. Behrens’s logo for AEG, 1907
2. "Rustic" Beehives, from Layens’s Cours complet d’apiculture, 1890
3. The huts of "savages," from Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme, 1924
4. Taut’s Glass Pavilion, 1914
5. Le Corbusier’s Ateliers d’Art, 1910
6. Buckminster Fuller, geodesic dome
7. Steiner’s second Goetheanum, 1928
8. The parabolic arc of bees constructing a honeycomb
9. Natural honeycombs without guidelines
10. Parabolic arcade in Gaudi’s Colegio Teresiano, 1889
11. The Alley method for breeding queens, 1861
12. Gaudi’s sketch for the chapel of Colona Güell, 1898-1908
13. Behrens’s AEG turbine factory, 1908
14. Natural honeycomb
15. Langstroth’s movable frame beehive, 1852
16. Huber’s leaf beehive, 1792
17. Cross-section of Layens’s "Primitive" beehive, 1874
18. Elevation of Mies’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
19. Perspective of Mies’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
20. Plan of Mies’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, 1921
21. A.I. Root’s "Simplicity" beehive, 1870
22. Rauchfuss nursery for queen bees
23. Le Corbusier’s Honeycomb Apartments, 1922
24. Lucio Ramirez’s Elmisana Beehive, 1948
25. Prokopovich beehive, 1807
26. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, 1947-1952
27. Bee larvae as illustrated by Langstroth, 1862
28. Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million Inhabitants, 1922
29. Interior, Kurokawa’s Nagakin Capsule Hotel, 1972
30. Exterior, Kurokawa’s Nagakin Capsule Hotel, 1972
31. Kikutake’s Tower Shaped Community, 1959
32. Section, Metabolist student competition, 1960
33. Kurokawa’s Takara Beautillion, Osaka Expo, 1970

http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/bunge.php