I'm trying to gather together some pieces of art that show the insane size and scope of a typical Hive, but I've only been able to find exterior illustrations. I was wondering if any of you have seen illustrations of what a Hive might look like up-close and/or inside.

Thanks!

The Necromunda game, which is downloadable on the GW website, shows a few pictures of the interior of Hives, I believe.

Those are not 40k but should work well enough:

http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hugh_ferriss_delineator_of_gotham/

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/05/communist-gothic.html

Idaan said:

Hm, I always pictured the hives way more cramped than those illustrations, at least in general. Is that not the case?

Well, obviously it'd depend on where in the hive you are, and on each individual hive, but yea, that is a fairly good image of the inside of one.

Nihilius said:

The thing is, there is no "standard" hive in the Imperium. They can either be built like the termite mound/spires of Necromunda, to a sprawling metal landscape of Volg. Some are even more strange like the walking hive city of Ambulon.

The cramped conditions are largely dictated by how the hive is built and the state of the planet in general.

I picture the hives of Landunder looking a bit like Rapture from BioShock.

Other than that, I agree with Varnias and Millandson.

It really is worth checking out / reading Idaan's first link here though.

Check out this quote from Hugh Ferriss:

Buildings like crystal.
Walls of translucent glass.
Sheer glass blocks sheeting a steel grill.
No Gothic branch.
No Acanthus leaf.
No recollections of the plant world.
A mineral kingdom.
Gleaming stalagmites.
Forms as cold as ice.
Mathematics.
Night in the Science zone.

Sounds like a Forge World to me, neh? Especially, "No recollections of the plant world." LOVE that.

Nihilius said:

I've always imagined that the "standard" imperial architecture is along gothic lines. Huge, monolithic buildings lined up with wast open areas between them. Each building, however, might be several kilometers tall and house hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people.

The open areas between the buildings are filled with transports of all sorts, carrying goods and people between hive buildings. There is little or no pedestrian traffic there except on small, cramped bridgeways used for ceremonial and maintenance purposes. Indeed travelling from one building to next on foot outside the brdigeways is impossible because the "ground" on which the hive buildings are seated is a twisted maze of maintenance infrastructure ranging from huge air ducts and waterpipes to open sewercanals filled with toxic waste.

Once you enter the hive building the first thing you notice is that the architecture inside the hive is similar to the infrastructure outside it. Huge part of the inner space is devoted as public space but unlike outside the building, the wide inside hallways are constantly filled with people. The main hallways are tall, sometimes reaching throughout the whole hive building and having their own weathersystems when the moisture from the breathing of thousands of people condensate and rain down.

Once you steer away from the public spaces the inisdes suddeny become more cramped. Corridors are barely wide enough for two people to pass without touching, there is a lot of doors leading into increasingly small living habitats. As the buildings themselves are tower-like the result is that even in most low-class habits (outside underhive) the ceiling is pretty high. A typical low-class living habitat might be 3 meters x 4 meters in size, divided into two "rooms" of 3x2 meters and with a ceiling at 3,5 or even 4 meters. This leads to there being very few actual furniture but lots of vertical space. Typical arrangement is to sleep on triple bunks on top of each other and store private property inside the habitat on tall shelves, all accesses with ladders.

However, as earlier mentioned an "imperial standard" means something only a minority uses... Imperium is so huge that the only real standard is the lack of any.

Dark Heresy writers seem keen to express the individual variations in hive worlds, and how each one looks different and is unique, but so far this hasn't really been reflected in the WH40k Artwork. Necromunda's "Hive spire" dominates representations of Imperial hive architecture, which I think is a shame.

I'd like to see some alternative visual representations of Hive cities. There are some great descriptions out there. The descriptions of Malfian hive cities always remind me of sweltering, seething tropical cities like Hanoi, Saigon, Bangkok etc, whereas Scintilla, with its grey stone, marble and pollution always reminds me of London, Paris or Rome.

In many ways I think a fairer representation of a hive city is the Dan Abnett Eustis Majoris model: a city very much like New York, Tokyo or indeed any other first world city, but on a vast scale, spread over hundreds of square miles, with a central hub characterised by colossal Administratum buildings many times the size of modern skyscrapers. Oh, and pollution so vicious that if you don't carry a heavily armoured umbrella, the rain wil strip your skin off!

PS: TS Luikart: LOVE the Ferris stuff! Now THAT's a Hive city! If you like that, check out the Soviet response:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_soviets

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=palace+of+the+soviets&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=O5gfS8v5K5yhjAem2pieCw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CB0QsAQwAw

Lots of good replies in this thread, thanks for the inspiration guys

Indeed! I appreciate all the insight. Please continue to post your thoughts or images if you come across anything helpful.