KANVA’s redesign of the Biodome Science Museum successful Montreal, successful collaboration with NEUF architect(e)s, strikes an immersive equilibrium betwixt radical and quality portion focusing connected clime alteration and knowing its effects.
Built for the 1976 Montréal Olympic Games, the operation is located connected Canada’s astir visited depository island. KANVA, which won the planetary contention held successful 2014, undertook the Biodome, Planetarium, Insectarium, and Botanical Garden design.
KANVA has reintroduced the splendor of the Montreal Science Museum-Biodome, which makes it imaginable to immerse visitors successful much than 1 ecosystem.
The architects were inspired by ecosystems arsenic analyzable arsenic the gathering and collaborated with aggregate disciplines successful each intervention.
The conception of architectural practice was brought to the fore successful the building, which aims to animate visitors to recognize biology problems. By enlarging the existing entrance, it was aimed astatine visitors to admit the existing scale. Thanks to the immense skylights, the gathering started to payment from daylight.
After reaching the immense unfastened space, a surviving furniture of the axenic achromatic biophilic plan was revealed. The cladding is stretched betwixt the cantilever and triangular beams and wrapped astir the structure. This layer, which evokes the feeling of infinity, aims to fortify the visitors’ sensory experience.
Focusing connected the travel itself, the plan features dynamic passages. Five ecosystems successful the Biodome, location to much than 250,000 carnal and 500 works species, gully visitors’ attraction to the enactment down the sight, sound, smell, and touch. On the way wrong the Biodome, visitors tin sojourn the Tropical Rainforest, Laurentian Maple Forest, and St. Lawrence Bay; aft the Sub-Antarctic Islands, they scope the 10-meter Labrador Coast.
In ecosystems connected by automatic doors, visitors are exposed to the earthy environment’s climate, smells, and sounds without seeing thing arsenic they walk done the beads. The walkways pb to a caller mezzanine that offers aerial views of the divers ecosystems and axenic achromatic core. The caller mezzanine level houses interactive acquisition exhibits and elaborate machinery to support the facility’s delicate ecosystems.
“Our mandate was to heighten the immersive acquisition betwixt visitors and the museum’s chiseled ecosystems, arsenic good arsenic to alteration the building’s nationalist spaces,” said Bebawi, a spouse of KANVA and the project’s pb architect. “In doing so, we proudly embraced the relation that the Biodome plays successful sensitizing humans to the intricacies of earthy environments, peculiarly successful the existent discourse of clime alteration and the value of knowing its effects,” helium added.
Project Info
Architects: KANVA, successful collaboration with NEUF architect(e)s
Area: 15000 sqm
Surface Area: 35,000 sqm
Year: 2020
Manufacturers : 3M, Zone Display Cases, Barry, Béton projeté M.A.H. inc., Goodfellow, Reynolds Polymer Technology, Serge Ferrari, Sollertia
Co-Concept Architect: Tudor Radulescu
Co-Concept Architect, Project Lead Architect: Rami Bebawi
Lead Project Manager: Minh-Giao Truong
Architectural Skin, Project Manager: Olga Karpova
Collaborator: Azad Chichmanian
Photographs: James Brittain, Marc Cramer, Mathieu Rivard