Gallery

Designed by Paul Nicholls & Jonathan Gales
Additional modelling by Matt Townsend & Alexey Marfin

Banished to floating space colonies, the human race is ruled by arepressive regime who have eradicated history but after his girlfriend is arrested, a young space-rigger called Xavier is forced to flee into the criminal underworld where he will uncover lessons of the past that enable him to rescue his girlfriend and simultaneously ignite a revolution.

The Hives takes inspiration from both the very large and the very small. Both natural and man-made structures were used as reference to create something which had a swarming master-plan, but a very controlled architectural detail. The Hives also had to look as if it had been built over generations so a varied aesthetic was desired while keeping its sprawling formation. In the natural world, bee hives, nests, ant farms and centipedes were all referenced and considered at design stage. Architecturally, the density of Andreas Gursky’s city photographs, Habitat 67, The Clusters In The Air and manyothers gave a good reference to the different scales we needed to design The Hives.