Hives, 2400 B.C.E. – 1852 C.E.

Hives is a visual archive that radically rethinks beehive technology, spanning from ancient honey-hunting to the first patented hive in 1852. Drawing inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, it explores the hive not as a tool of human dominance, but as a vessel holding the complexity of human-bee relationships.

Curated from years of research and defying conventional historical linearity, this book revisits a fundamental question: Is today’s hive truly the pinnacle of design? Through an instinctive, non-traditional taxonomy blending photography, graphic design, and writing, it invites us to imagine new futures for this more-than-human architecture. Grounded in decentralised and biophilic perspectives, it invites readers to explore innovative possibilities for coexisting with and learning from nature’s ingenuity.