DEANNA BARIS

The Honeycomb House is a residency for beekeepers in training, enabling people living in the building to learn a trade, build community with other beekeepers, and grow a relationship with a hive through cohabitation. The house includes a communal kitchen available to the wider site, a dining room, a patio space, bedrooms, and a semi-private common space on the second floor. Glass enclosed beehives are interwoven with human spaces. The building explores the potential for cohabitation between humans and bees, considering the ways in which cross-species behavior runs in parallel and mutually beneficial ways.

Parallel food production occurs in the kitchen, which is surrounded by beehive walls and includes a honey bar. The dining and common room spaces both have built in furniture connected to the beehives. Bedrooms on the second floor are enclosed but sit within beehive walls. In this way, the bees are not visible but the white noise improves sleep quality for residents. Accessibility is a consideration too- the levels are connected by stairs as well as a winding ramp. The small spaces underneath the ramp, which are too small for human occupation, lend themselves well to use for beehives. The exploded axononometric diagram shows the breakdown of human and bee space. While these spaces can be loosely categorized, the boundaries are flexible given that humans enter bee space to tend to the hives, and bees will inevitably enter the human spaces through planned and unplanned spatial gaps.