Building 21 - McGill University's Interdisciplinary Idea Lab

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

About Us

An unconventional space for unconventional ideas

See Who We Are

200+

Scholars and projects across 12 BLUE cohorts

40+

Different academic disciplines converging at B21

900+

Workshops, events, and special guest speakers

$600,000+

Granted to interdisciplinary research

BLUE Programs

BLUE—Beautiful, Limitless, Unconstrained Exploration—leading scholars to build ideas beyond the acknowledged, the recognised and the comfortable

How to Join

Based at McGill in Montréal, QC, Canada

Building 21 is born out of a mission to foster great talent and ideas at McGill University in Montréal, QC and the broader Canadian innovation ecosystem. We are open to scholars of all academic disciplines.

See who we are

Interdisciplinary, out-of-the-box research

Building 21 welcomes a diversity of ideas. Scholars can pursue ideas that lie outside of their discipline and pursue intersections of interests they might never have had a chance to piece together.

Learn about past projects

Our yearly fellowship program

Building 21 offers yearly research residency fellowship positions for scholars to bring their ideas to life through the Beautiful, Limitless, Unconstrained Exploration (BLUE) program.
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Apply for BLUE
Partner with us

Visit Us

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

Weekly calendar

Scholars

We’ve support 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.

Current Cohort

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.

All Scholars

Fostering breakthrough

Mathilde Papillon pioneered a new subfield in the multimedia technological study of dance with her B21 project. Now, she applies her research at the NBA and MLB as a PhD candidate at the Geometric Intelligence Lab.

Alumni Testimonials