our vision
building 21 is a space in which unique, daring, beautiful, and rigorous ideas and scholarship are welcomed and nurtured.
Building 21 at McGill University is an innovative educational experiment that allows intrinsically motivated scholars to join an innovative, rigorous, and experimental culture of peers and mentors. This culture actively facilitates the development of both original scholars and original scholarship, inclusive of all ages, disciplines, and levels of expertise. In collaboration with a global network of adjacent communities, Building 21 maintains a commitment to challenge, refine, and encourage a diversity of approaches, processes, and thinkers across the spectrum of human competencies.
our mission
building 21 assumes the responsibility of attracting, facilitating, and refining truly original and rigorous scholars and scholarship.
Building 21 implements a system of reciprocal learning, through co-mentoring, in which every member is both a contributing agent to and a recipient of its pedagogical ecosystem. We nurture expansive creativity, competence, and rigor amongst an interdisciplinary community of peers and mentors. Building 21 both curates and facilitates beautiful and original work and trains scholars to convert their curiosity and passion into tractable questions and find potential answers. Building 21 is a home for complex problems and hosts a multiplicity of diverse, sometimes contradictory, perspectives across disciplinary boundaries.
Origin of the name
The name Building 21 was inspired by MIT’s Building 20. We named it Building 21 in honour of Building 20, and used the number 21 for the 21st century.
MIT’s Building 20:
Building 20 was a temporary wooden structure hastily erected during World War II. Since it was always regarded as "temporary," it never received a formal name throughout its 55-year existence.
Because of its various inconveniences, Building 20 was never considered to be prime space, in spite of its location in the central campus. As a result, Building 20 served as an "incubator" for all sorts of start-up or experimental research, teaching, or student groups on a crowded campus where space was (and remains) at a premium.
At one time, more than 20 percent of the physicists in the United States (including nine Nobel Prize winners) had worked in that building.
Institute Professor Emeritus Morris Halle commented that the abundance of space in Building 20 meant that "many quite risky projects got off the ground. Linguistics, my field, was one such risky project. But for the existence of Building 20, it would not have been developed at MIT." Noam Chomsky pioneered modern linguistics and generative grammar in a "shabby" nondescript-looking "miserable hole" of an office in Building 20 for several decades.
MIT professor Jerome Y. Lettvin once quipped, "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!"
Wikipedia
