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Design

Massive LED Hive Makes You Feel Like A Honeybee

Artist Wolfgang Buttress brings the honeybee's plight to light in his upcoming installation for the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo.

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When all the honeybees in the world die, much more than honey will disappear with them. As the gatekeepers of our fragile ecosystem, not only do bees bring beauty to our fields, they help to pollinate at least a third of the food we consume. Unfortunately, honeybee populations have dwindled for the past seven years. Hive keepers are worried: the problem is increasingly unsustainable.

With The Hive, an upcoming installation for the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo, which also features a food-focused eco haven and a smog-absorbing building, artist Wolfgang Buttress wants to bring the plight of the honeybees to light. He and his team plan to build an elevated, intricate, steel lattice structure with LEDs that pulse with the signals from a real beehive. To get to the honeycomb-like sculpture, visitors must follow a trail like much like that of the honey bee, passing through both a fruit orchard and a wildflower field.

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“My wish is for visitors to engage with the UK Pavilion as a whole and for the hive to be recognized as a barometer for the health of the earth, drawing parallels between a hive and human society,” says Buttress in a press release.

Watch a walkthrough of Wolfgang Buttress’s planned installation, and check out more photos of Hive below:

Wolfgang Buttress UK Pavilion Milan Expo 2015 Walkthrough from Wolfgang Buttress on Vimeo.

To learn more about the project, visit The Hive on Wolfgang Buttress' website.

h/t inhabitat

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