The London based firm Arup Associates have won the top Golden Beetle Prize for their ‘Insect Hotel’. The ‘Beyond the Hive’ competition, hosted by British Land and The City of London, created a brief that called for a sustainable and creative insect habitat for the City of London parks.
The bio-mimetic design is constructed out of 25 layers of 20 mm-thick birch plywood. The irregular voids are cut out using a CNC machine and loosely bonded together on site with mechanical fixings.
The 1500mm x 1500mm hotel’s facade is influenced from the voronoi pattern, an organic system of irregular shapes often found in nature, such as the wings of a dragonfly.
The 500mm deep compartments provide an armature for the recycled waste materials, each compacted with different types of deadfall to cater to different types of insects: Stag beetles require rotting logs for their larvae to eat and grow in, while butterflies and moths prefer a series of vertical slots using dry wooden pieces and tree barks. Images via Designboom.
