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The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaud铆 to Le Corbusier by Juan Antonio
Ram铆rez, Reaktion, 拢15.95, ISBN 1861890567

SPANISH art historian Juan Antonio Ram铆rez reckons he is probably
obsessed by bees. He blames his father, who stumbled across a book on
bee-keeping soon after the Spanish Civil War and was never the same again. 鈥淢y
father became a convert to movable-frame or rational apiculture, devoting
himself totally to dreams of indubitable wealth.鈥� Alas, his father鈥檚 empire
quickly crumbled, leaving the family bankrupt. The costly hives, sold cheap,
later turned up as props in Victor Erice鈥檚 1973 film The Spirit of the
Beehive.

So Juan and his brothers grew up 鈥渟urrounded by the material and moral ruins
of that apicultural empire鈥�. Given such a childhood, Ram铆rez surmises,
perhaps it鈥檚 not surprising that he sees hints of beehives everywhere he turns
in the work of many leading 20th-century architects. OK, so it might be
paranoia, he modestly concedes. All the same, he says, 鈥渢he paranoid can
sometimes see the truth beneath the camouflage鈥�.

And Ram铆rez is definitely onto something. His fascinating account
describes how the social life of bees has been co-opted by social movements on
both the left and the right, and celebrated either for their rigid hierarchies,
with everyone knowing their place under the ruling monarch, or as symbols of
community spirit and harmonious, cooperative work.

Even beehives are packed with modernist meaning. Ramirez shows that just as
traditional beehives were being 鈥渞ationalised鈥� by 鈥減rogressive鈥� bee-keepers in
line with the prevailing scientific spirit, so architects were busy radically
reshaping human dwellings. Read this book, and you鈥檒l never look at a tall
building in quite the same way again.