Montreal Biosphère

On Saint Helen's Island in the St. Lawrence River, a huge lattice sphere catches the light above the trees. The Montreal Biosphere is the steel skeleton of a geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminster Fuller with Shoji Sadao for Expo 67, 76 metres across and 62 metres high. It is built as a double layer, with inner and outer grids of struts joined by a latticework of struts, and it once enclosed a skin of transparent acrylic cells that turned the whole structure into a vast glowing bubble.

It began life as the United States pavilion at the 1967 world's fair, which ran from April to October that year. Visitors rode an escalator reported to be the longest unsupported one in the world up to platforms where real spacecraft, including the Freedom 7 and Gemini 7 capsules, hung from the frame for an exhibition on the space programme, while other floors displayed American folk art, Hollywood memorabilia and large contemporary paintings. Fuller had also tried to equip it with motorised shades that would open and close like pores in skin to control the temperature, but the system never worked properly. After the fair the United States gave the building to the City of Montreal, and it served as an aviary and garden, then as an exhibition on the environment. On 20 May 1976 a welding spark set the acrylic skin on fire; the bubble burned away, leaving only the steel frame standing.

The empty dome stood unused until 1990, when Environment Canada decided to turn it into a museum. A set of enclosed buildings designed by Éric Gauthier was placed inside the open frame, and the museum opened in 1995, devoted first to the waters of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence and since 2007 to the environment in general. Since 2021 it has belonged to Space for Life, Montreal's group of nature museums. The dome's influence reaches beyond architecture: the chemist Harold Kroto, remembering his visit to the pavilion, named the newly discovered cage-shaped carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene after its designer. In 2021 The New York Times counted the dome among the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture.

Getting there

The Biosphere stands in Parc Jean-Drapeau on Saint Helen's Island, a short walk from Jean-Drapeau metro station, across the river from downtown Montreal and about 3 km from Longueuil on the south shore. The nearest airport is Montréal Saint-Hubert Longueuil Airport (YHU), about 9 km away; Montréal–Trudeau International Airport (YUL) is about 17 km away.