“At a zoo, you observe animals,” says the acting director of EspacePourLaVie , the city-owned organization that operates the Montreal Biodôme. “Here, you’re immersed in their world.” Go behind-the-scenes of the museum's recent transformation:
Julie Jodoin is fine with most descriptions of Montreal’s Biodôme—just not zoo. “At a zoo, you observe animals,” says Jodoin, acting director of Space for Life, the city-owned organization that operates the popular museum. “Here, you’re immersed in their world.” Since its opening in 1992, the Biodôme has housed 200-plus species in five reproduced ecosystems beneath the soaring concrete vault of the city’s Olympic velodrome.
By 2014, however, Space for Life’s leadership felt that the Biodôme wasn’t immersive enough. That year, the museum launched an international design competition, with the goal of adjusting the building’s rote, linear traffic flow and expanding visitors’ exposure to the animals. The winner was Kanva, a small Montreal architecture outfit whose proposal was designed in collaboration with Montreal’s Neuf Architectes and the engineering firms Bouthillette Parizeau and NCK.
Bebawi is a co-founder of Kanva, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary architecture firm. Recently, he was the lead architect on Traces, a multimedia public-art installation at the Canada Pavilion site at Expo 2020 in Dubai. After a two-year renovation—and plenty of collaboration with local biologists—the Biodôme reopened in August of 2020, greeting museumgoers with an eye-popping new feature: its grand entrance hall is now enveloped in a “living skin” made of four-storey swathes of polyester coated with PVC. At the back of the hall, the skin narrows to a slender passageway whose floor slopes almost imperceptibly upward, slowing visitors to prepare them for the wilderness within.
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