It's 3:47, and I can't sleep. I'm staying in Calgary for a layover (coming from Seoul, heading to Montreal). My flight leaves in the early afternoon today. It's still dark outside, and the household I'm crashing in is silent. The house sits in the peaceful hills next to the Rockies: the view is stunning. I'm impatiently waiting for the sun to come up to see the orange flood the landscape (and maybe try to catch a timelapse on my phone).
About 40 minutes ago, I gave up trying to fall back asleep and went to check my phone (screw it, I'll find a way to sleep on the plane or something). I open my emails.
New email:
Sender: Building 21, McGill
Title: URGENT: The usefulness of 'useless' spacesBuilding 21 is an organization at McGill University where I have spent a lot of time. At first, I thought it was just another newsletter.
No. It was a statement saying that Building 21 was officially closing this year...
I had heard that there was difficulty maintaining the program, but it always felt like something that would indefinitely get pushed to the future. Now this was actually happening, and I think it's a shame.
I need to rewind a little bit to give some context about the organization. Building 21 – the cool kids call it "B21" – is an organization that operates (as of the time of writing this) at McGill University. It's always difficult to describe it concisely and accurately, but it's sort of like a think-tank slash community-space slash event-venue slash third-space slash classroom?
It is located on the corner of Sherbrooke and University street on the North-East corner, for those who don't know Montreal: that's a very sweet spot. Sherbrooke is one of the biggest streets in the city, and University Street is one of the main avenues that borders the downtown McGill campus (a beautiful street to stroll or bike down year-round). Most people who are familiar with the McGill campus, when I tell them about this, are always surprised by the existence of such a space. "OMG, I pass in front of that spot all the time! Oh, so that's what's going on in that building?!" they'll say.
The building containing B21 is the old "Royal Victoria Residences" (RVC) building, which is still used for student housing. It is an old building with a grey stone façade bordering Sherbrooke Street. Between the sidewalk and the building is a little patch of grass, delimited by a small pointy black metal fence. In the patch, there are a couple of trees and greens as well as a bike rack (that I've used a lot). A recognizable dark green door innocently decorates the stone façade and mystifies the students waiting for their bus at the corner of the street. If you dared walk the short asphalt trail separating the bus stop from the imposing gray building and ring the doorbell, someone most likely would answer and let you in on the secret.
The first time I stepped foot was in the fall of 2022, while I was still a student at McGill. I was invited by a friend of mine (Daniel) to one of their open-door potlucks. The potluck took place in the B21 space. I guess that's one of the confusing parts: B21 is a space, but it's also simply a community. Without the space, it still exists, but the uniqueness of the location has definitely bled into the "culture" of the organization. Hence, for the time being, at least, it is difficult to dissociate the two.
The thing that I think strikes most people when they enter is how much like a home the space feels. I don't mean this in a cheesy, overly sentimental way, I mean it very functionally: you remove your shoes before climbing up the couple of stairs at the entrance, there is a kitchen and bathrooms with baths and showers. In fact, this used to be a home. I forget the whole story, but I think it's where the person in charge of the residences lived. Contributing to the coziness and warmth are comfy chairs and sofas all around the space.
My memory is a little fuzzy about the details, but I think I was greeted by Ollivier (the founder and program coordinator, who's also a literature professor at McGill). There were already a good number of people chit-chatting and potlucking in small groups. Ollivier, after spotting my francophone accent, spoke to me in French, which is, from my experience, somewhat unusual at McGill, a mainly anglophone institution. At that university, in a group setting, partly for accessibility reasons, since the student population is so international and doesn't speak French, most interactions happen in English. All in all, it was a small linguistic interaction that stood out, like most things at B21.
I was brought on a little tour of the place. There is the "main room" where most meetings (and "lightning sessions") occur. In the back, there is the "podcast room", containing a table with a podcast-oriented audio interface with microphones and headphones all nicely set up. In that room, one also notices a couple of nerdy gizmos: a small 3D printer made of cardboard (probably one of those DIY kits to give your geeky kids, like the one that I was/am, to teach them about engineering and creativity), a MIDI controller, a double-helix metal-wire sculpture with different country flags in it and a VR headset. Seeing all these things did nothing to stop the now continuously growing feeling that there was something really cool about the place. Next to the podcast room is an office room where Ollivier and Anita (the main coordinators at the time) had some desks. There were also two other rooms, nick-named the "blue room" and the "green room". The blue room, at the time, had its floor covered in a soft blue cushion material to shield against impacts. No, this was not some kind of martial arts dojo; it was meant to be a VR room. The floor padding helped minimize the collisions with the real world of someone participating in virtual activities. The green room got its name from the number of plants next to its couches and chairs. Ollivier sort of explained the idea of the place: it's a place where students are invited to work on projects that would not be realizable in the traditional academic setting. If you wanted to do a project on dream interpretation methodology, procedurally generated electronic music, or the philosophy of comedy and funniness, the space would welcome it. "Wow! This space is incredible!" I thought.
The name "Building 21" is an homage to "Building 20", a temporary building that existed on the MIT campus during the Cold War. I'll let you read the story of the building yourself on its Wikipedia page, but basically, it was a building shared by thinkers from a wide range of fields, in particular physics and cognitive sciences.
After the tour and putting some food in my plate, I went to the main room where I started eating and talking with people there. It was really mind-boggling how many interesting people with deep knowledge about a huge variety of topics. Not only that, but there was an immense plasticity and openness in all conversations that I had that day. It's funny how life unfolds. At that time, I was completely oblivious to the intensity that would evolve in many of the relationships that had just been sown.
They say it takes a village. But in the case of Building 21, B21 is the village. This is something that is obvious to me now, but that was not always the case.
After this utopian first encounter with the organization, I started getting more involved with it. I started attending the "lightning sessions". At the time, this was sort of the core activity of the organization. In these sessions, members of the B21 community would brainstorm ideas related to their projects. Turn by turn, participants would bring up their progress, ideas, concerns, issues, etc., related to whatever they were working on. About two times a week, there were these big group sessions that would last 2+ hours, where everyone was welcome.
One of the intimidating parts of this process is to come up with a project of your own (which you are in no obligation to even do: if you just want to contribute to other people's projects, directly or simply through conversation, you are welcome to do so). In my case, I had some vague ideas about some geometrical toy models linked to the phenomenon of emergence. This was the perfect space to develop these half-baked ideas since there was no pressure. As a physics student, I learned the hard way that pursuing a thesis on a very ill-posed problem in a traditional academic setting is something you might want to reconsider doing. However, B21 is not a traditional academic setting, and this is its beauty: it's a space that invites you to work on ill-posed problems and gives value to the process of untangling your thoughts. Now, this might all sound a little abstract and useless to your average pragmatic person. Would you want to invest in an institute that explores vague problems with very unclear profitability? If your goal is to cash in, probably not. However, if you value (for instance, as a university) spaces where people can truly take time to explore the process of sorting out their thoughts and being genuinely confronted with new ways of thinking, then spaces like B21 are rare gems. To the pragmatic person, I invite you to consider two things: first, the very concrete usefulness expertise in "the process of thought untangling" can have and, second, promoting and advocating for a process-loving attitude changes how people interact with the world, and potentially makes their relationship with their environment happier, healthier, and possibly even more fruitful.
In my humble opinion, I believe that universities should serve a social role in their geographical area of operation and bring the people who frequent them to become the best version of themselves. A place like B21 can do wonders through the spread of its culture in a university campus and on a larger scale in a metropolitan community.
To be transparent, I am very critical of some aspects of the organisation. B21 is not perfect (however, this imperfection is part of this is its strength). Whether it's a bias for the eccentric for eccentricity's sake, or a certain lack of rigor in some projects (which is difficult to avoid in such a multi-disciplinary environment: it's hard to call BS on things you don't know much about), there is room for improvement. Nonetheless, this by no means invalidates the other positive contributions B21 has made to its surroundings.
Going back to my experience: I picked a vague project and went along for the ride. I ended up switching projects completely a bunch of times, but that is ok: this is what the space was for. In the process of researching and interacting with the community, I learned some projects specific skills (for one of the projects, I got a deeper understanding of signal processing and filtering), but, more valuably, to my eyes, I sharpened my sense of question-asking and I learned to better read the waves and motions of ideas that arize in an inter-disciplinary ecosystem of thinkers.
Above anything else, I made lasting friendships at B21. Interactions with people from a variety of programs opened my eyes (admitedly slightly relunctantly, at first) to concepts in topics I had not given much thoughts to prior, hell, some I did not even know existed (I vividly remember actively practicing pronouncing the word phe-no-me-no-lo-gy while commuting back home from B21, walking out of a bus in the snow of Winter 2023 as the sun had already set). These people and their collective spirit are to me what constitutes the beauty and soul of B21. The openness to talk about anything, and to consider that this or that question might actually be interesting to investigate in a welcoming environment, is something I have not found elsewhere.
This is something that makes me hopeful: the secret sauce of building 21 can self-assemble through individuals, if given the right conditions. Passionate people about a variety of topics that yearn to connect with one another and collectively dig deeper into their interests already have in them what it takes to create B21.
B21 acts as a gathering place – a third space – where clever, passionate people can connect with one another and mutually help themselves develop. Although all of this happens through the interactions of the members of this community, it seems like a catalyst is needed for this to work. This is the role that I see B21 serving: a catalyst for the assembly of a community.
Hopefully, I've managed to communicate somewhat adequately my own personal experience with B21 and that the picture is clear: where I stand, the closing of B21 is a big loss. I don't know how permanent this closure is, or how/if the organization will mutate into something different. All I know is that I would find it a shame to annihilate the possibility for someone of experiencing what I have been lucky enough to experience at B21.
If B21 closes in its current form, I am optimistic that a way will be found to preserve its catalytic power. I think that this is an important discussion to be had with the remaining B21 community: what now? What is the best way to preserve this nucleation site realistically for the time being? Can B21 exist without a building space? Can it exist in a delocalized fashion?
There is so much love that already exists for B21 and what it stands for that a solution is bound to be found. Even amidst a profit-driven society, I have a lot of hope that something will emerge. After all, as long as there are passionate and curious people in the world, the green door will metaphorically remain open.
Thank you, B21, for all these years of unexpectedness.