The Beehive is a new office building and conference center that was attached into an existing fabric of warehouses. An existing two levels, wood building was demolished and replaced by a new two levels structure. The project is an experiment in creating a public image for the building that is capable of communicating its existence in a limited area along a busy street. Concentrating into practice formal solutions that never before realized and often provocative, taking steps toward influence and the irregular: in this Beehive project architect Eric Owen Moss from California proudly represents his work, even though his choices cannot be categorized to a new innovation.

The Beehive works not about resolution, not also derived from a sense of build-a-ability. Medschool.com as the client needs the overall of the building to be flexible, open work areas with some private offices. The main entrance is at the ground floor of the Beehive and reception area for Medschool.com. The office and conference building placed on the site of a previous wooden structure in an area which occupied by warehouses and industries on its three main sides. The site is quite anonymous, aesthetically speaking, and needed a landmark of its own. This is why Eric Owen Moss altering the facade of the building that facing on the busy road. The Beehive is therefore considered as the front of the building.

Despite Eric Owen Moss’s rejection of the idea, this conference facility and office space for creative business has predictably been connected with a beehive’s historic associates to productivity, sociability, and organization. Like other projects he has designed in Culver City’s practice area development for long time partners the developers Frederick&Laurie Samitaur Smith, the Beehive is part of Moss’s continuous investigation of kinetics, structural transformation and contradiction. Similarly, too, it uses an attention grabbing sculptural form as an attachment to a more common composition, in this case is the existing warehouses.

Four columns group together by steel tubes form the structure of the building. The cladding of the facade was attached to them, becoming the most characteristic element of the whole project, which would otherwise be a simple cylinder. Steel and glass are the main materials, not only in the external panels but also inside the surfaces. Rheinzink material S-Lock wall system was preferred for the Beehive. Crowner Sheet Metal Products, Baldwin Park, CA, installed the system with a preweathered finish.

The shape of the Beehive was characterized by programmatic requirements and the limitations of the site. The varying shape responds to the different internal functions and the act of imposing to an existing group of buildings. The building is sited on an equally structural bed of grassy landscaping, which is moulded over a structural form that gives it a textile-like finishing. From the entry and reception area a stair is leading to a glazed conference room. A second stair leads to the roof which is encircled by an Escher like continuous staircase surrounding a skylight. On this roof formed out of the staircase, an open space is used as a terrace with wide views over the city. Precisely in order to emphasize the strong communicative value of the new building, Eric Owen Moss built it farther back from the street, leaving room for a square or garden for meeting place.

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