Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architects seek to bring visitors closer to insects through innovative architectural and museological approaches. The new Insectarium integrates the building with the botanical garden that surrounds it.
A walled pollinator garden serves as a welcome space. The garden slopes down to the base of a greenhouse, a familiar feature of the traditional botanical garden, containing a central room and living environments for live insects.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Beyond the greenhouse, an enigmatic planted mound bubbles up from the surface. This cocoon-shaped dome contains the collection of the insectarium within. The building incorporates various bioclimatic and sustainable development principles.
The route is precisely choreographed through the building, dissolving the divides between the human and the natural with barrier-free exhibitions and immersive sensory experiences.
A walled pollinator garden serves as a welcome space. The garden slopes down to the base of a greenhouse, a familiar feature of the traditional botanical garden, containing a central room and living environments for live insects.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Description of project by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte
Scientific report after scientific report confirms that we, humans, now face an inevitable moment to redesign our relationship with this planet and with the non-human species that share it with us. A crucial part of this process of redesign will be the fostering of new understandings and representations of “the natural”. Over hundreds of years, we have built architectures for the preservation, classification, study and display of animals, insects and plants, which have cemented a sense of separation between the human and the natural. In the age of the climate crisis, this separation is collapsing.
The new Montréal Insectarium is an institution which responds to this urgent moment. Through a design by architects Kuehn Malvezzi alongside Pelletier de Fontenay, Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes and atelier le balto, the Insectarium aims to transform the public’s relationship with insects.
This is achieved through innovative architectural and museological approaches which draw the bodies of visitors closer to those of insects. Opening at a crucial moment for re-thinking relationships between human and non-human biology, the new Montréal Insectarium represents a critical new approach for museums of natural history.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Background
The first Montréal Insectarium opened as the largest insect museum in North America in 1990. Amongst its founders was the popular Canadian entomologist Georges Brossard whose personal collection of thousands of species of insects had previously been stored in his basement.
The former Insectarium building was an enclosed structure with an architectural footprint resembling a fly. It featured a permanent exhibition containing over 3,000 preserved specimens and 100 live specimens.
The Insectarium sits within Espace pour la vie, Canada’s largest natural science museum complex which also manages other municipal institutions: the Biodôme, the Biosphère, the Jardin Botanique and the Planétarium. The design for the new Insectarium was carried out by Berlin-based architects Kuehn Malvezzi with Montréal offices Pelletier de Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes as well as landscape architects atelier le balto, Berlin. This partnership won an international competition for the project in 2014 with a concept to fuse architecture and nature.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Following a seven-year design and construction period, the new Insectarium opened in April 2022.
Architecture and nature
The design of the new Montréal Insectarium closely integrates the building with the surrounding botanical garden while providing astonishing experiences for visitors, a comfortable workplace for Insectarium staff and, most importantly, safe and sensitive environments for its insect inhabitants.
The architectural and museological philosophy of the project is built upon detailed analysis of 400 years of museums, orangeries, greenhouses and other architectures for the categorization and display of the natural world. From the development of botanical gardens as part of medieval monasteries, through the opening of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1683, the advancement of greenhouse technologies for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and on to the large scale experiments of Biosphere 2 in Arizona, there exists a rich history of structures and designs for the control of nature. However, this history cannot be separated from the history of exploitation and transformation of the environment.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Acknowledging the destructive history of this conceptual separation between humans and other natural life, the project’s design subverts museological norms and expectations. Unlike museums designed to contain changing exhibitions and displays, the Insectarium’s curatorial concept and its museological expression are held in the very architecture of the building. The precisely choreographed route through the building dissolves the divides between the human and the natural with barrier-free displays and immersive sensory experiences.
When first approached on foot, the external architecture of the Insectarium is visible through three archetypal structures that communicate a light touch construction process with integration into the pre-existing landscape of the botanical garden. A walled pollinator garden serves as a relaxing space of welcome The garden slopes down to the base of a greenhouse – a familiar feature of the traditional botanical garden – which contains a central hall and living environments for live insects. Beyond the greenhouse, an enigmatic planted mound erupts from the surface. This cocoon-like dome holds the Insectarium’s collection inside.
Immersive experience
The Insectarium visitor’s experience begins and ends with a promenade through the Pollinator Garden. The garden gently slopes down towards the Insectarium greenhouse; its sawtooth roof a prominent landmark ahead. This garden blurs the functional divide between the building’s interior and exterior. Butterflies welcome visitors and provide them with their first encounters of insect life; encounters that will become transformed during the progression through the museum.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
The Labyrinth
Upon passing through the entrance hall, the immersive experience of sensory metamorphosis begins. The Labyrinth takes visitors through a meandering path designed to disorientate; to signal a departure from familiar spatial environments and the entrance to an underground terrain.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
The Alcoves
This shadowy and intriguing zone is comprised of six immersive Alcoves, each designed to disorient human senses in different ways and to mimic the sight, sound and movement of insects. One eye, many facets simulates the pixelated vision of a fly. The alcove contains a large screen made up of flickering pixels. The pixels reflect the room itself, creating an image that becomes clearer as the visitor approaches the screen, seeing themselves through the eyes of a fly.
Good vibes amplifies the Alcove’s vibrations to reflect the sonics of a grasshopper. Insect noises are turned into vibrations transmitted through a grated floor. Rather than simply hearing, the visitor feels the sonic vibrations in their whole body, just like an insect.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
From blade to blade is a route of climbable sticks, requiring the balance of a gnat atop a leaf. Visitors are invited to experience the many strategies insects use to move on different surfaces.
Tight squeeze turns humans into cockroaches who must negotiate a tight squeeze. Inside is a sequence of passages that can be navigated by ducking and crawling, experiencing the ways an insect navigates its burrow and is able to deform its body.
The world in UV replicates the ultraviolet vision of a bee. Blacklight reveals the abstracted forms of floral patterns on the floor, their petals shimmering in ultraviolet.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Ceiling walk turns the world upside down. The entrance to the room seems inverted. In fact, the whole room is upside down, forcing visitors to walk on the ceiling and stare at the floor above their heads.
Having experienced sensory experimentation in the Alcoves, visitors finally meet living insects in the Tête-à-tête Gallery. Here, a bespoke vitrine fans out with six concave viewing boxes, allowing visitors to block out the exterior world and experience a close-up view of flying, buzzing, scuttling insects. The niches facilitate concentrated and immersive contact with the different species of insect; a contact that has been reformulated by the immersive Alcoves.
Chromatic collection
The Insectarium’s collection is housed and displayed in a cavernous domed hall that erupts through the earth as a planted mound. On the minimal shotcrete interior, a wall of 72 framed displays shows the museum’s extensive and unique collection of preserved insects unfolding across two horizontal bands. The presentation of these bands echoes the spatial and decorative effect of a frieze and, as with the ten-meter-high ceiling, gives the room a sense of ornamentation and grandeur akin to a classical religious space.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
The first band is organized chromatically to display the extraordinary biodiversity and beauty of insects. The world of insects is synonymous with a colorful world: different designs, multiple shades and color palettes exist. The colors not only express extraordinary and splendid beauty, but also have an additional importance: by displaying showy colors, some insects attract their sexual partner for mating. In each section, insects of the same color are associated in order to amaze visitors with the diversity and richness of their physical appearances.
Gallery of evolutions
While at the first level of narration the biodiversity of insects is approached through an aesthetic lens, the second level explores the evolutionary success of insects through different themes, such as habitat and gender. Here, visitors learn that insects are specimens not only older than humans but also of greater importance for the planet. Thanks to their extraordinary evolutionary processes, insects now represent 85 percent of animal diversity; in a sense, the world belongs to insects.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
The two levels have the combined effects of astonishing and educating the public.
Interspecies encounters
Re-emerging from the earthen textures of the underground, visitors enter the Grand Vivarium. This spacious, light-filled greenhouse features a gradually undulating route that progresses through a range of microclimates supporting the life of varying plant and insect species.
Many of the insects, such as butterflies and caterpillars, move freely in the space and can be observed without barriers: moving through the space, visitors see hundreds of colored butterflies and coleoptera fill the air and resting to feed on bushes of flowers. One display, the cage d’emergence allows visitors to watch butterflies hatching, before flying directly into the vivarium.
Elsewhere, giant beetles and giant centipedes are presented in glass vivaria that are integrated into the botanical landscape of the Grand Vivarium. Alongside the winding path, trees with long and intricate branches are occupied by leafcutter ants which travel back and forth quickly from their nests, carrying immense leaves, blossoms and sources of food.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
The experience of strolling up and down the greenhouse touches all the senses. It allows for a full immersion into the different habitats of insects, instilling an awareness of the complexity of their ecosystems and of the importance of preserving them.
At the center of the greenhouse building is the Creative Workshop, a glass-walled space allows for views into the Grand Vivarium and the production area and beyond the Insectarium towards the botanical garden outside.
The layout of this space is deliberately open to a multiplicity of uses: it could host tables and chairs for hands-on scientific experiments; educational workshops; discussions, lectures, film screenings and performances.
There is always something going on, giving everyone a chance to participate in their own way, and to engage with the richness of the Insectarium.
Bioclimatic Building
In order to make the building symbiotic with its inhabitants and visitors, the Insectarium incorporates several bioclimatic and sustainable development principles.
The stepped shape of the greenhouse volume is naturally oriented towards the south and allows the production greenhouses, the large vivarium and the workshop to benefit from maximum sunshine throughout the year. Dynamic control systems, usually used in commercial production greenhouses, continuously adjust bioclimatic parameters such as solar gains and natural ventilation. Textile shades placed right under the envelope can be deployed mechanically in order to both limit the entry of light during the summer and insulate the greenhouses to limit heat loss at night during cooler months. Motorized louvers strategically placed in the curtain wall allow effective natural cross-ventilation.
Montreal Insectarium by Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier De Fontenay and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. Photograph by James Brittain.
Valorize the resources
In addition to the glazed greenhouses and laboratories above ground, a significant part of the building’s functions are placed below ground level. These functions are either exhibition or technical spaces and therefore do not require natural light. By placing them underground, we take advantage of the thermal mass of the earth to stabilize temperature variations and maximize the buildings insulation. Furthermore, advanced mechanical systems allow the recovery and redistribution of a large part of the heat generated in the greenhouses to heat the rest of these building.
A range of additional systems such as textile shades, motorized louvers geothermal wells, roof water recuperation and the use of local, sustainable, VOC-free materials support the building’s bioclimatic approach and make the Insectarium a truly sustainable building.
