The UK Pavilion at the 2015 World Expo in Milan is creating quite a…buzz, and we can see why. Designed by the British artist Wolfgang Buttress, the structure, entitled BE, is a stunning piece of architectural sculpture in which 169,300 pieces of aluminum and steel have been woven together to create a ‘virtual beehive’ measuring more than 14 feet tall.
The theme of this year’s World Expo, which opened on May 1, and runs through October, is “Feeding the Planet, Energy For Life,” a subject meant to highlight issues of sustainability, technology, and food—to which end Buttress, who hails from Nottingham, has conceived of a way to highlight the precarious plight of the honeybee.
Visitors to the ‘hive’ will be kept busy with a “sensory composition of audio and visual effects,” thanks to a real colony of industrious bees a thousand miles away in an existing Nottingham beehive—whose real-time activities will be transmitted inside the pavilion for visitors to experience in living sound. Stingingly smart, we say. 
Via Arch Daily; Wolfgang Buttress
