Our Philosophy
The name Building 21 is in honour of MIT's Building 20 and we used the number 21 for the 21st century.
Building 20 was a temporary timber 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.
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.
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.
Who are we?
An unconventional space for unconventional ideas
“The things that are weird are exactly the things you need to be paying attention to. They tell you that your model of the world is incomplete in important ways. You have to treasure the exceptions.” - Mike Levin, Tufts University
Since 2017, hundreds of scholars all over McGill University have come to Building 21 in pursuit of ideas they can't explore elsewhere.
Building 21 is an experiment in new, innovative, and beautiful ways to approach the university experience—an open lab where curious minds from all levels and disciplines are invited to come together to collaborate, to think, and to dream outside the traditional confines of their areas of study and expertise.
Watch our introductory video, screened at the QS Reimagine Education Awards 2024, London, UK, as finalists in the Developing Emerging Skills & Competencies Award category.
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