BATTERSEA BEE FOUNDATION (1983)

 

Designed in 1983 in response to a competition for possible uses for Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s original power station, Battersea Bee Foundation was intended to be viewed in the context of another recently completed project, In Tribute to Madame de Pompadour and the Court of Louis XV, 1983–84. Replacing the power station’s generators with centrifugal honey extraction machinery seemed a perfect transformation. The Battersea Bee Foundation proposal stipulated that all south London’s parks and verges be planted with lavender, reinstating Lavender Hill as a true anachronism. A tax allowance would have encouraged people to develop their gardens and to cultivate new species to augment the bees’ diet.

 

The structure of Battersea Bee Foundation was intended to house an assortment of subsidiary industries and treatment clinics. A library stocked with every book pertinent to apiculture would reside in the two north towers. Research laboratories and education departments would service in-house pharmaceutical and beauty product manufacture. Wax extraction facilities would supply polishes, candles, cosmetics, leather and fabric preservatives, and wax models for dentistry. A restaurant using products taken from the hives would be the food source for the human workers.

 

MEAD

An elaborate brewery would manufacture mead from fermented honey. A centrally placed reflecting pool, running parallel to the hive rooms, would circulate water via a giant vascular system, cooling the hives and transferring their heat together with heat generated from the solar roof deck to run a giant steam pump at the opposite end of the main hall, facing the Fool’s Paradise. The pump would distribute mead, via a network of supply pipes, to fourteen cultural institutions throughout London, among them: the Houses of Parliament and Battersea Dogs Home. Scott’s power station was reputed to be the largest steel and brick structure in Europe, and its interior would retain its original grandeur. Battersea Bee Foundation would be the world’s largest apicultural center in the world and the inhabitants of London would be the envy of every civilized nation for their clear skin and vigorous health.

 

FOOL’S PARADISE

The main turbine hall of the station, once clad in Italian marble, would house an enormous ground glass prism, a Fool’s Paradise placed at the north entrance foyer. There, a series of reflectors would channel light into the east wing where it would be refracted into the full color spectrum. Spectrums produced by refraction through prisms were common phenomena during the eighteenth century.

 

In Battersea Bee Foundation each color refracted from this grand prism would be separated and refracted into fourteen sequentially identical hive rooms. Each chamber would radiate a pure color, which the worker bees, by color association, could identify as their zones of occupancy.