What do you seek?

Building 21 is an interdisciplinary idea lab supporting McGill undergraduate and graduate students in pursuit of bold and original ideas.

Featured artwork generously provided by Cosmodernism, Seeing Into The Unknown, Artificial Life Environment, Jules Roze.

A lab for beautiful and daring explorations

Enabling students to pursue bold questions

Discover our scholars

Help us take our mission to the next level

180+

Scholars who pursued a project at B21

$600 000+

Funding for projects and programs at B21

40+

Different disciplines of scholars

900+

Events held gathering scholars of all backgrounds

Who we are

Leading scholars across disciplines to bring unconventional ideas to life.

Learn about our mission

For the sake of discovery

Projects at Building 21 are pursued for the sake of discovery. There are no credits, no grades, no evaluations. Only the pursuit of knowledge.

Safe haven for original ideas

We give scholars no-strings-attached resources to facilitate their exploration. Scholars collaborate to advance the most unconventional ideas.

A community of explorers

We run cohort-based programs that connect the most curious seekers to a tight-knit community. We offer structure, mentorship, and networks.

Our alumni are pushing the boundaries of knowledge and creativity at these institutions

"

B21 showed me what obtaining a university education is all about: exploration, collaboration, and challenge.

Vincent Van Duong

BS Math & Physics, McGill University
Part III, University of Cambridge
PhD Candidate Physics, NYU

Drawing a poster on a the floor with dogs!

What's On

Come experience Building 21 yourself at 651 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal.

See upcoming events

A event at Building 21

Scholars

We’ve supported hundreds of McGill undergraduate, Master's, and PhD students across all disciplines in their exploration.

From idea to impact

Kat Kavanagh developed the ideas for a citizen science non-profit at B21 that now monitors over 5,000 waterbodies across Canada and has trained over 25,000 Canadians on how to conduct water quality tests.

Enabling new paths

Rasha Lama initiated a series of spatial sustainability projects at B21, unrelated to her commerce degree, which led to receiving a graduate scholarship in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Fostering creation

Yigu Zhou built a prototype of a Brain-Computer Interface with the NeuroTech community at B21 and is now a MD-PhD student at McGill studying epilepsy at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

PhD Mechanical Engineering

Modelling lupus using Peircean biosemiotics

MA Digital Humanities

Studying the "vibe" of AI and the nuances of human experience

BEng Mechanical Engineering

Crafting a map that captures storytelling across geography, time, and degrees of global warming

Devising curriculum for primary school Eklavyas (have-nots) students in India

BASc Cognitive Science

Analyzing the psychological effects of digital labor on human workers

Sébastien Avakian

Quantifying emergent properties of soccer through collective player motion analysis

Mohamed Debbagh

PhD Bioresource Engineering

Pioneering digital plant representation inspired by Neural Radiance Fields encoding

Mohamad Hosein Danesh

PhD Computer Science

Developing autonomous robots for space environments to navigate and conduct scientific experiments

See all scholars

Programs

Building 21 offers multiple programs for scholars to create new knowledge wherever they seek.

BLUE Fellow (Residency)

9-week fellowship with $3,000 in funding to pursue a project of your own

Pursue your idea with our space, mentorship, and community

Tanenbaum Open Science Institute Fellow

Towards a future of open science

Cordelia Dingle Fellow

Explore the future of environments

Special Guests

We invite a diverse range of people at the forefront to engage with our community and enrich their pursuits.

Watch our Speaker Series

Betty Edwards: Learning to Draw for Thinking's Sake

Professor Leah Price, Author & Book Historian

Michael Lapsley: Founder of the Institute for Healing of Memories

Prof. Michael Levin: Planarians and Intentionality

Francesca Panetta, Creative Director at the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality

Dr. David M. Peña-Guzmán: When Animals Dream

Professor Angus Fletcher: The Brain and Narratives, The Limits of AI

Professor Paul Yachnin: "What did we do right?"

David Krakauer: President of the Santa Fe Institute

Author Alexander Weinstein: Creative Writing Workshop

Professor Frédéric Gilbert: The Ethics of Implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces

Professor Paula Williams: The Psychology of Awe

Refik Anadol, Media Artist & Director

Artist Karen Tam: Eating Gold Mountain Dreams

Professor Darryl Haggard: Observing Black Holes

Azeem Azhar, Founder of Exponential View

Events

Our community hosts a variety of events at our space.

CATLAB (Creative Arts & Tech Lab)

Tuesdays, 5 - 8pm

Bringing together artists and creators of different traditional and digital disciplines.

Collectif La Collation

Thurdays, 6:30 – 8pm

Atelier de poésie La Collation; Rejoignez-nous pour un atelier d’écriture poétique avec le Collectif de poésie La Collation!

ENCODE Justice Canada

Event-based

Fighting for human rights accountability and justice in the age of AI

Fireside

Event-based

Cozy fireside conversations with hackers, builders, and tech entrepreneurs

"

It’s immensely gratifying to pursue an idea of my own with the right community and support that I couldn’t find anywhere else than at B21.

Elena Frie

BS Earth System Science, McGill University

Drawing a poster on a the floor with dogs!

Join us

We’re always looking for brilliant scholars and organizations to advance our mission.

Be part of the community

Partner with us or donate

Come visit in person