Who we are
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Vision and Mission
Vision
Building 21 is a space in which unique, daring, beautiful, and rigorous ideas and scholarship are welcomed and nurtured.
We gather intrinsically-motivated scholars of McGill University to create an inclusive environment of innovation, rigour, and experimentation. In collaboration with a global network of innovative communities, Building 21 maintains a commitment to challenge, refine, and support a diversity of approaches, processes, and thinkers across the spectrum of human competencies.
Mission
Attract, facilitate, and refine truly original and rigorous scholars and scholarship.
Create a home for complex, unconventional problems and hosts a multiplicity of diverse, sometimes contradictory, perspectives across disciplinary boundaries.
Origin of the name
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.
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)
Our team
Building 21 is run by a small group of individuals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
After completing her B.Sc. in Physics at McGill University, Anita Parmar continued on to complete her Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of New Mexico, worked as a statistician and research manager in non-profit for health policy, as a logistician for an import-export company in Mexico City, as a management consultant in Montréal, and started her own company designing supply-chain analytics tools before returning to McGill University.
Ollivier Dyens is full professor in the Département des littératures de langue française, de traduction et de création. He is the author of 14 books. He was Deputy Provost, Student Life and Learning at McGill from 2013-2018. His area of research is the impact of technology on humanity.
Alex Nicholas Chen recently graduated from McGill University’s Honours Cognitive Science program. His projects at Building 21 have involved disclosing blind spots in existing research paradigms and articulating novel ways of pursuing and understanding human phenomena. He is interested in un-forgetting the invisible delights, joys, tragedies, and vitalities of our everyday experiences.
Journalist by trade, communicator by profession. Director of Engagement and Partnerships at McGill and Director of Media Relations. Always concerned with communicating, popularizing, informing and building bridges with the community. A career as a journalist with Radio-Canada radio and television, filled with travel, major interviews and reports always imbued with humanism. Co-author of a book on the short history of AIDS in Quebec.
Tatiana is a doctoral candidate in Educational Studies and Language Acquisition at McGill University. With the GPS internship, Tatiana is exploring paths for transdisciplinary knowledge co-construction and dissemination, specifically seeking new or improved avenues for collaborative, participatory research that transforms literacies and language education towards equity, justice, and sustainability, especially in rural communities.
Nakiya Noorbhai graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a minor in Linguistics. She has started a PhD the department of Geography and Urban Studies, where she looks at construction sand mining and infrastructure development. At B21, she leads the Future of Cities program where she works with a diverse group of students to design cities built to withstand the complex challenges of the future.
Darius is a graduate of the cognitive science and neuroscience programs at McGill. His academic research and his project at Building 21 explore the neuroscience of aesthetics and emotion. Outside of B21, he currently works as a research software developer for the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience.
David Jhave Johnston is a digital-poet writing in emergent domains: AI, 3D, VR, and code. Author-programmer of the multimedia human + AI writing art-project ReRites (Anteism Books, 2019), the theoretical-history Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications (MIT Press, 2016), and many online interactive literary works at www.glia.ca. Jhave currently is an independent writer, affiliate faculty in the Computational Arts Dept at Concordia University, advisor at McGill’s Building21, and an interdisciplinary creative consultant.
A career of adventures in teaching, government communications, policy development, think tank research, fundraising, and educational technology in Canada (Calgary, Winnipeg, Waterloo, Toronto, Guelph and Montreal), Bermuda, and Germany.
Viola Hallé Ruzzier is a Program Assistant at Building 21. She recently graduated from McGill University with a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Biology. She is interested in studying how science is written, and has written a short volume containing stories based on scientific concepts and phenomena.
Claudia completed a M.Sc. in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and studied French Literature and Linguistics during her BA at McGill. Her research focuses on metaphor, and what metaphor processing can tell us about human cognition. She is also interested in category-learning, and how different categories can shape and influence our perceptions. Claudia has a soft spot for poetry, nature, and déjà-vus.
MingXi Gu joined Building 21 as an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science. With Alex Nicholas Chen, he led the design and implementation of Building 21’s current visual identity, website, and communications. MingXi is intensively passionate about accelerating progress, innovation ecosystems, and technological disruption.
Contact us
Building 21
General contact
Ollivier Dyens
Co-director, Building 21
Anita Parmar
Co-director, Building 21
