columns and lintel that frame an exterior entrance, clearly express their
classical origins. Inside the building, concrete mushroom columns are
exposed in several spaces. They evoke images of the flat-slab columns
that were introduced in the early 1900s, and in particular, those
columns that support the roof of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Johnson
Wax administration building, Racine, Wisconsin.
Rather than drawing upon historical sources to inform the detailing of
the Beehive, Culver City, California, the architect explores ideas of ‘bal-
anced unbalance’.^12 At ground floor the structural form is as unusual as
the structural detailing above. Four square hollow-section posts that
appear to be haphazardly orientated in plan and section lean outwards
and are wrapped around horizontally by regularly spaced steel pipes
that generate the curved form akin to an inverted beehive (Fig. 7.37). At
first floor one encounters most unconventional structural detailing.
The two rear posts kink as in a knee-joint, but the detailing suggests
that the structure has snapped in bending. The rotation at each joint is
expressed graphically by a triangular ‘crack’ or gap between the upper
and lower sections of the posts (Fig. 7.38). Notions of instability,
fragility and damage are conjured up in one’s mind. Only upon closer
inspection one sees how welded steel plates within the hollow sections
provide enough strength for structural safety.
150 STRUCTURE AS ARCHITECTURE
▲ 7.37 The Beehive, Culver City, USA,
Eric Owen Moss Architects, 2001. The
exterior with the main entrance to the left.
▲ 7.38 A ‘broken’ post at first-floor
level.
