Wolfgang Buttress’s ‘The Hive’ at Kew Gardens

Forty-four tons of aluminium now stands at Kew Gardens. The Hive was made by the artist Wolfgang Buttress with the designer and engineer Tristan Simmonds, and was originally built as the centrepiece of the UK Pavilion at Milan Expo 2015, where it took the gold award for architecture and landscape.

The structure responds to the buzzing of the bees living within it, which turns the sculpture into a kind of instrument — the sound of the colony is as much the material as the metal. It is a rare piece of landscape architecture in which the science and the spectacle are not in competition.

More: Wolfgang Buttress · Kew Gardens · Tristan Simmonds.