Bee Home is a collaborative, open-source beehive design developed by Space10, Bakken & Bæck, and Tanita Klein. It is designed with the purpose of providing solitary bees a home worldwide. Bees and other pollinators play a critical role in sustaining our planet, with one-third of our food supply relying on these valuable insects. Unfortunately, human impact has resulted in a rapid decline of pollinators worldwide. To address this issue, Space10 aimed to develop an affordable and accessible home for these vital species. Bee Home is an open-sourced design that is free to use and can easily be manufactured locally on a global scale. Inspired by small scale architecture, the beehive design is simple, easy to build and robust. It is customizable in height, materiality, number of stories and placement. The scale ranges between 2-9 stories high, resembling to a small residential building. The placement can be adjusted based on where it is intended to be positioned, such as standing, grounded or fixed. It is recommended finding a suitable spot with an even surface, facing the morning sun and within a 300 meter range of flowers, whether a garden, balcony or rooftop. It is intended to be freely placed based on preference and suitability.

The Bee Home website is playful and interactive. Before building the site, Bakken & Beack investigated how bees interpret colors, what their nests look like and even led a drawing assignment with kids to help develop the identity. The lines on the website correspond with the natural movement of bees. I encourage you to visit their site and play with the different configurations and customizable options. Download the flat files, free of charge, and bring these to a local maker to manufacture the new home, or manufacture it yourself for those that have access to the materials, the necessary skill sets and tools. With open source design, Space10, Tanita Klein and Bakken & Baeck enable users to be part of a global solution, even on a smaller and private scale.

Last May, I had the pleasure to discover this piece during the Furnishing Utopia‘s Public Access show. This show was a collaborative effort between Architecture & Design Bookstore, HeadHi, and design studio Ladies & Gentlemen Studio. Furnishing Utopia posed a foundational question to the design community: “How can creative practices be more rooted in acts of care and empathy for the external world?”. Collaborators teamed up to curate an inclusive indoor and outdoor exhibition that connects local communicates with their local environment through design. Public Access showcased the works of 37 designers at the Naval Cemetery in Brooklyn, inviting the public to view and interact with the selected pieces.