Vancouver sits directly on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a 1,000-kilometre fault line that runs from Northern California to Vancouver Island, and there’s a 37 per cent chance that the catastrophic earthquake known as the Big One will hit the region in the next 50 years. The city updated its building code in 2024, but many of Vancouver’s mid-century concrete highrises are still seismically vulnerable. Not the Hive. The new mass-timber office building in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats neighbourhood, designed by the architecture firm Dialog, has a distinctive honeycomb-style exoskeleton fitted with seismic dampers. …The team extensively tested the reimagined design to meet a strict safety standard, including full-scale seismic simulations at the University of Alberta. Researchers were especially focused on ensuring the connections between the timber beams and columns held up after an earthquake. The Hive passed with nary a tremble.