what they would see if men were the size of bees...

in maurice maeterlinck's the life of bees, he imagines what a beehive would look like to a man the size of a worker bee. in juan antonio ramirez's book the beehive metaphor, he suggests that the forms and mechanics of manmade beekeeper's beehives influenced a number of modern architects, such as le corbusier, antonio gaudi, peter behrens, and bruno taut. since maeterlinck's text is quoted in ramirez's book, one is given a kind of permission to not only equate maeterlinck's text with a natural hive, but also a man made one. so one can look at the RPPC above (from eastern europe circa 1920), and imagine one of the men shrunken down to the size of a bee, given wings, and drifting inside. maeterlinck's description feels a bit psychedelic, and suggests the architecture of bruce goff as written about by jose luis borges...:

from the very top of a cupola greater in size than that in st. peter's in rome right down to the ground, enormous walls of wax, vertical, double and parallel, descend; enormous geometrical constructions suspended in the darkness and emptiness... each one of these walls, made of a substance which is still fresh, virginal, silvery and sweet-smelling is formed of thousands of cells containing sufficient food to feed an entire population for several weeks. here we can see the brilliant red, yellow, pink, and black stains caused by the pollen, the love juice of all the spring flowers in the transparent cells. all around, in long, magnificent, golden pendants, in rigid, immobile folds, the april honey lies in its twenty thousand sealed reservoirs which will only be opened in time of extreme need...

ramirez's book is full of interesting facts related to the history of bee keeping as well as architecture, and he draws lines between things in a much more intuitive way than most academics writing about architecture (i haven't read many who have written about bees...). i would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in such a personal approach to the intersection of seemingly disconnected histories.

measured by the eye...

"i spoke of harmony and suggested the disaster of abrupt interruption in the delight which is our due. terminology appropriate to music... precisely! architecture and music are sisters, both proportion time and space. the tool which cultivates our feeling of enchantment is proportion. our feelings so closely bound up with it that in its highest form we approach the esoteric, the language of the gods. feeling derived from architecture is determined by the measure of distance, dimensions, heights, volumes: mathematics possesses the key to - or away from - unity.

would you believe it? architecture's key, proportion, has been lost, forgotten. proportion, which in certain periods meant everything, leading men to the very heart of mysteries, is no longer something for us to think or worry about; it has been abandoned. that's what we've come to. proportion, eminently visual (for aren't we dealing with objects measured by the eye?), can concern the metaphysical, thereby linking the material to the spiritual..."

le corbusier, talks with students, 1961; image: model for corb's 1958 philips pavilion...