The Beehive Metaphor

The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudi to Le Corbusier

by Juan Antonio Ramirez

London: Reatktion Books, 2000

ISBN: 1-86189-056-7

Read by the author in Oct. 2025

"My son, eat honey, because it is good, and the honeycomb, which is sweet to your taste. Know that such is wisdom for your soul." (Proverbs 24:13-14)

אכל בני דבש כי טוב ונפת מתוק על חכך, כן דעה חכמה לנפשך.

The Beehive Metaphor is presented by the author as a study of how architects have used the design of beehives as an inspiration for their architecture. In a previous post I discussed a similar book which studied how ants, termites, spiders, birds, and other animals built their homes and may have served as inspiration for humans. Unlike that book, here the author zooms in on a few architects and focuses on their work, drawing tenuous connections between projects and bees. The book is most interesting in the first chapters in which the author describes the history of beekeeping and how hives changed in the the nineteenth century. Unfortunately the connection between these hives and architecture of the time seems forced at times and left me wanting more. 

Personally, I found the analysis of Arieh Sharon to be more interesting, although much briefer. Moshe Safdie also mentions his beekeeping in his recent biography, If Walls Could Speak, and has designed a number of honeycomb-inspired projects like the Students Union for the San Francisco State College and Habitat Puerto Rico. Jerusalem also houses the Ramat Polin housing project by the recently deceased Zvi Hecker. These are a handful of projects I'm familiar with that really do look like they were inspired by bees. No doubt there are many others, and Ramirez would have done well to track down some of them, instead of finding tenuous connections in the work of Gaudi and Le Corbusier.