Multispecies Sensing (or “Becoming Ecosystemic”): An Introduction to the Sensory Exploration of the Montreal Biodôme
by Dr. Erin E. Lynch
The exterior of the Biodôme is organic, sweeping down in curved lines like the carapace of a shellfish, or like some prehistoric creature preserved in stone. The arching interior ceiling mimics this skeletal first impression, but here it’s as though the creature has taken a deep breath – the expansive concrete ribs of the space let light pour in from outside, scattering over and through the creamy biophilic fabric that has been stretched like skin over the Biodôme’s interior bones. It draws us, almost inevitably, deep into its belly.
Itself a repurposed velodrome from the city’s Olympic past, the Montreal Biodôme underwent major renovations between 2018 and 2020. The architects behind the revitalization project, KANVA, put a major focus on multisensoriality in their design, acknowledging the power of the senses to connect us to our environment (and its non-human inhabitants). As lead architect Rami Bebawi notes, “‘Architecture is a mechanism to solicit senses; sound, smell, touch, taste, and sight. We share senses with all living species. They anchor us. They affect our instinctive behaviors’” (Gestalten, 2021 [ “The Story of Montréal’s Living, Breathing Biodôme”]). Now more than ever, the sensory design of the Biodôme as a “museum of ecosystems” warrants further examination. How does the design of the Montreal Biodôme shape the sensory and socionatural encounters within? What ways of sensing and knowing are foregrounded across the space? What role do human and non-human “others” play in co-producing the Biodôme’s atmospheres?
Across two different field visits in spring 2025, researchers from the Explorations in Sensory Design project considered how the experiential design of the Montreal Biodôme impacts how we make sense – not just of the museum’s underlying conservation narrative, but of our broader connections to the natural world. The reports in this section – by graduate student researchers Maria Simmons, María Vargas, Nesli Sriram-Uzundal (with contributions from Jayanthan Sriram), Rosalin Benedict, and Sarah Grant - are as diverse and atmospheric as the ecosystems they trace, teeming with sensory variety and the felt tensions of a space where the “natural” and the artificial collide.
The Biodôme is a living museum that resists pure ideas of exhibition. Here, the unruly specimens sometimes prove elusive, hiding from view, while at other times they gaze back with equal curiosity. As our researchers detail, the (sometimes literal) atmospheres of the Biodôme center embodied encounter and felt presence, sensitizing us to our relationships with the environment and our more-than-human companions in significant (if not always comfortable) ways. As such, in aiming to make sense of the emergent, sometimes asymmetrical web of relations that make up multispecies “contact zones” (Haraway, 2008) like the Biodôme, this exploratory research embraces the “speculative wonder” involved in multispecies ethnography (Ogden, Hall & Tanita, 2013).
This introduction aims to orient the reader to the various spaces of the Biodôme in order to set the stage for further exploration. While each of the researchers on this project charted their own route through the Biodôme’s atmospheres, their accounts intersect across the space through moments of resonance and dissonance, belonging and exclusion, immersion and tension. In their sheer variety, these reports demonstrate how the felt atmospheres of the Biodôme sensitize visitors - to others, to the environment, and to their own place in the world - in diverse but undeniable ways.
The Laurentian Forests
Walking through the beaded metal curtains that line the doorways between the Biodôme’s ecosystems becomes like a rite of passage between worlds – they fall heavily over my skin and threaten to tangle in my hair, clinking together in my wake in what becomes one of the signature sounds of the space (much to the chagrin of at least one of our researchers). A child beside me pulls one string of beads taught, in order to run it through his fingers, intrigued.
Passing into the cool air of the Laurentian Forests, I take a familiar lungful. The space smells of a forest floor, of damp earth, must and something vegetal. It smells of my youth, chasing speckled daylight through a canopy of trees – though there’s no poison ivy to dodge or bugs to swat, and the paved pathway doesn’t crunch or sink beneath my feet. As both Sarah Grant and Maria Simmons observe, the light in the Laurentian Forests has an uncanny valley effect – at once real and unreal, a mix of cool natural light with the warm, artificial stadium bulbs that act as a diffuse second sun. The trees here are budding; the atmospheres in the Biodôme shift with the seasons by design (Espace pour la vie, n.d.), but spring is coming faster here than it is outside (where the trees stand spindly and barren from an extended winter).
Figure 1: The dueling suns of the Laurentian Forests
Alongside the living exhibits, children (and their parents) frequently animate the space, whether through the unabashed wonder of the former or the translation attempts of the latter. Parents hold up their little ones, rapt chubby faces pressed to the glass to see the otter, who playfully spins and bobs before them to great effect. A woman points out the ducks who sit grooming their downy undercoats to the side of a pond. “Coin, coin, coin,” she quacks, and smiles when her little girl mimics it back. Each (mother and child) seems to give the space greater meaning for the other – an experience which Nesli Sriram-Uzundal poignantly describes in her account of sensing the Biodôme through her son’s eyes.
Deeper within the space is an oversized beaver “den,” complete with textured walls carved to mimic the real deal. The resident beavers are napping, however, but there is a live feed into the lodge that reassures visitors of their presence. I peer closely to watch the nearest one’s nose twitching in his sleep. There’s a distinctly musky odour here - I cannot be sure whether it belongs to the beavers or to their neighbour, the lynx (who I never manage to spot).
Figure 2: Catching a nap on the Beaver Cam.
As I amble through the Laurentian Forest path, I notice little paw prints in the red paving stone, as though a critter has wandered through wet cement. I suspect, from what look to be sensor lines around the otter enclosure, that such an escape was unlikely – that the clawed trail through paving stone is merely meant to give the impression of time and nature, like the painted concrete stones around the ecosystems. But before I can even finish the thought, a robin dive bombs my head on its way to a nearby branch, skimming close enough to ruffle my hair – a reminder that the exhibits here are curated, but they do not sit still.
The Gulf of St. Lawrence
The journey into the Gulf of St. Lawrence begins underwater. Through a porthole, I spy a fish lazing by while the orange flippers of ducks churn the surface of the water above. The space opens into a curved wall of glass so thick it induces a mild vertigo to peer down through. Observing the aquarium at short range, a child is startled by an orange fish that swims directly into his field of vision, and he takes a step back. Beyond, sturgeon prowl in slow circles, their scales looking softly airbrushed in the blue glow of the aquarium. A little girl imitates the movement of one, crawling parallel to the glass enclosure in time with her aquatic instructor. Ducks spear through the water to nibble at food scattered on the pebbled floor of the tank, trailing ribbons of tiny bubbles in their wake. I’m enchanted by the dance of the kelp forest they weave between – only later will I realize the kelp is made of silicone, a convincing fake.
Figure 3: Peering into another world (in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).
Above ground, the lines between the exhibit and the visitors seem to blur. We walk out along a shallow river of water rimmed by a low wall – so low, in fact, that multiple children have to be talked out of taking a dip in the sandy shallows in the short time I am standing here. Farther up the path, an exposed tank of red anemones and palm-sized skates (the fish, not the footwear) seems to beckon visitors to touch despite signs to the contrary. The bar around the larger aquarium tank prevents people from taking an accidental swim with the circling fish below. Still, many stand on tiptoes and lean over to catch a peek - the water mesmerizes, and the waterfowl play a game of follow the leader between the faux rock islands and coastal outcroppings that rim the painted horizon. ‘REGARD!’ a child cries in delight, and he gives a passing sturgeon a rather fantastical voice, gnashing his own teeth as though it is a sea monster chomping through the water.
I could swear the air is fresher here, perhaps even a bit saline (though that might just be my imagination conjuring a whiff of the sea at the behest of the circling gulls overhead). I hear a peculiar whistle and let my eyes follow my ears – expecting to find a bird, I instead track a man in a puffer jacket on a platform above, calling down to the birds in the exhibit. One trills a response. Looking up, I spy hulking heron-like birds perched on the upper branches of the space, peering down at the flow of people as we meander through
I decide to join the herons in their perch, winding through the upper landings that rim the perimeter of the Gulf of St. Lawrence exhibit until I find myself at an in-between space – one of several liminal zones the exist in the seams between ecosystems.
Figure 4: Getting a bird's eye view on the Gulf of St. Lawrence (and the Biomachine above).
Interlude: A Bird’s Eye View
The sunny yellow Biomachine – an interactive exhibit on the museum’s mezzanine designed to inform visitors about the inner workings of the Biodôme - seems strategically placed. From this upper level of the space, you can peer down like a self-satisfied god into the ecosystems below (though, as Maria Simmons notes, a “god without powers”). To your left, the mists trail up from a lush rainforest; to your right, seabirds circle a mock bay in a dance with the fish below.
Arriving at the Biomachine, you might feel a bit like Dorothy in Oz, stepping behind the curtain to find a man in place of a wizard. This is a strategic unveiling, a glimpse at the work that goes into maintaining each of the ecosystems in equilibrium. While, as Sarah Grant notes, evidence of the techno-mediated nature of the ecosystems is clear throughout the Biodôme, here the museum lays it bare. It’s here that I learn that the “kelp” in the bay below are artful fakes made of silicone; that some birds’ beaks need to be filed down in captivity. I learn that the soles of penguins’ webbed feet can wear out, so the staff engineered them custom boots out of wetsuits. There is evident care here, and the Biomachine exposes how a village of human labour and technological innovation is required to maintain the Biodôme as a living, breathing museum.
Figure 5: The Biomachine - an interactive exhibit that lets visitors peek behind the curtain of the museum's inner workings.
It's here I encounter Nesli (and her son Zayn, who is pushing buttons with enthusiasm). I inquire after their visit, and hear that – while there had been a “bleeding incident” – Zayn was largely loving it. Only later, reading her report, do I realize how significant it was for Nesli and Jayanthan – having both experienced exclusion from education and cultural spaces - to watch their son encounter the wonder of the museum with such unselfconscious joy. As Nesli writes, “Zayn’s journey … becomes an act of resistance, a joyful reclaiming of knowledge and space, and a rewriting of our lived experiences” (Sriram-Uzundal, this section).
From the mezzanine, I watch the gulls flit against the nets over the Gulf of St. Lawrence exhibit, again and again, as though testing for a weak point. Above them, I can see the sky through the Biodôme’s concrete ribs. Watching them reach for it carves a hollow in the pit of my stomach. Later, I would read how Maria Simmons and Rosalin Benedict each found a moment of resonance with a small blue and brown bird - an Eastern Bluebird - from this same vantage point. Maria describes a sense of kinship with the little bird, as they share a breath and strain against the “limits of [their] experience.” On a different day, the little bluebird (I hope though cannot say for certain if it is the same one) also found Rosalin, and she describes the transcendent feeling of sharing a moment of pure aliveness with the curious creature. In each case, from the bird’s eye view, we are confronted with the agency of the living beings in these ecosystems and our own entanglement with them. Wonder, connection, and tension coexist in these encounters, marking the Biodôme as a space of felt contradictions.
The Tropical Rainforest
The Tropical Rainforest smells verdant in an entirely different way - at once strange and familiar. Looking around, I realize why: while the tropical jungle as a whole is an alien environment to me, I have many of these same plants dotting my windowsills back home (my own little ecosystemic paradise to ward off the winter gloom). I name them in my head – monstera, arrowleaf philodendron – with a cultivated familiarity; I have never seen them in the wild. The air is close and seems to cling to my skin when I enter – doubly so when jets from a towering false tree douse me with a fine warm mist. I regret the coat I’m wearing and have to shuck it off halfway through my journey. My Colombian colleague, María Vargas, has a completely different reaction – for her, it’s not only the plants that whisper of home, but the entire atmosphere of the space that envelops her in a sense of belonging. The humid air is a shock to my system, but a balm to hers, and she vividly recounts coming alive in this space.
Figure 6: A change in atmosphere.
In the tunnel to the ecosystem’s bat caves – curiously devoid of the fluttering wings or skittering feet the mice beyond the glass walls, though perhaps the din of excited children simply overpowers them – the thick air captures the perfume of others, displacing any scent of home. Towards the perimeter of the ecosystem, I weave through a throng of people who are gaping at a pair of squabbling bright red parrots. People comment and cringe as they watch the birds fight for the same perch – the latter letting out deafening squawks and snapping at each other’s wings. There is a palpable sense of tension; the animals are not playing along with a narrative of peaceful coexistence.
It is perhaps worth noting here that, much as I take my share of delight in how the Biodôme lets visitors wander between worlds, I have long found zoos and similar sites a bit unsettling. I don’t worry that the Biodôme’s animals are neglected – on the contrary, I assume that a team that would go so far as to engineer wetsuit flippers for penguins with worn-out feet is taking their duty of care quite seriously. But when the inhabitants of its exhibits press against the glass, or flit against the ceiling nets, or have what might be – for all I know of parrots – a good-natured tiff about who gets the best branch, that unsettled feeling creeps in around the edges of my delight. Then again, I am a creature carved of wanderlust, so it might be my own preoccupations I find reflected back in these encounters.
There is a sense here of looking with others (both human and non-human) – a man and his daughter stop beside me on the path, looking for where I have my camera trained, and I point out a little golden tamarin perched in the trees above. The monkey peers through the foliage as though camera shy. The tropical fish, by contrast, crowd around the glass viewing wall in an endless stream to look back out at the passing visitors – seemingly their entertainment for the day - and even a tortoise bobs up to say hello. The napping capybaras seem completely nonplussed at their crowd of admirers – but they share their enclosure with caimans, so perhaps it’s just that they are not easily ruffled. Above the capybara enclosure, a sign beckons visitors to watch out for the sloth, who lives in the tree canopy and is easily mistaken for a clump of leaves. Like many others around me, I crane my neck and scan the trees and creeping vines for any glance of it – but, like my colleagues, I never manage to spot it.
Figure 7: Looking back (and looking with) in the Tropical Rainforest.
Interlude: Spaces of Possibility
At the central hub of the Biodôme, between the various ecosystems, exists a liminal space – simultaneously a waiting room and a crossroads. In her report, María Vargas explores the possibilities and provocation of this space – of its central guidepost, prompting visitors to choose which world they will explore next.
The designers describe wanting these transitional spaces to be as neutral as possible. Writing on their mandate to revitalize the Biodôme’s public spaces, alongside visitors’ connection with the ecosystems, architecture firm KANVA notes: “The new core … amplifies the sensorial experience of visitors transitioning from its pure neutrality to the multi-sensorial discovery of its adjacent ecosystems” (via Pintos, 2021).
As I sit on a rounded bench below the guidepost, watching the sunlight dapple the creamy curved walls, it occurs to me that – though the design of the space may be neutral – on a busy Saturday afternoon the experience is anything but. This is the intersection of the uneven rhythms of the space, as families, many with strollers in tow, weave in and out of the ecosystems, jangling the beaded curtains as they go. The chum-tinged aroma of the subpolar region filters in (as a father remarks to his child beside me, “smells like fish sticks, huh?”). Children playing a game of tag scramble across the floor and over the bench behind my back. Walking along the perimeter of the atrium, you can feel rapid changes in humidity and temperature as you pass the various ecosystems. The space may be neutral to the eye, but to the ear, the nose, and the skin, it hums with a current of life.
The Subpolar Regions
At the entrance to the subpolar regions (which encompasses the Sub-Antarctic Islands and Labrador Coast), it’s not a beaded curtain that marks the journey between worlds. Rather an archway of ice – meant to “give visitors a little shiver” (Espace pour la vie, n.d.) - and a breath of fishy air usher you into where the penguins and the puffins wait. I touch my hand to the blue-lit ice wall – checking to see if it is real – and feel it begin to melt slightly beneath my palm. The coated interior reminds me of an old chest freezer in need of defrosting. But the proffered chill of the polar room is tempered by the sheer number of bodies contained within.
Figure 8: The icy archway to the Subpolar Regions.
Sarah Grant recalls the anticipation she felt approaching the subpolar zone, remembering how much she enjoyed visiting it with her family in the past. She describes the playful sociability of the penguins as they huddle in little groups (as though to chat), waddle over the rocks or dive into the water before an enchanted crowd, all of it bracketed by the reverent stillness of the ice walls.
While the air in the tropical zone felt close, the subpolar zone feels the most claustrophobic to me. Because there is only one path to look in through the glass, this is the ecosystem that seems most like a diorama in a traditional nature museum – only here the specimens on the other side of the glass have come to life and are undoubtedly looking back. The ring of stands for visitors mirrors the tiered rock wall on the other side of the glass – some people perch along the stands for a better view over the crowd, and the penguins look back from their own cliffed, faux-basalt amphitheater. A rockhopper with his signature punk yellow fringe tilts his head at me, and we observe each other with naked curiosity through the glass. As María Vargas notes, there is little by way of natural light in this space - only the false sun of the spotlights. I feel that gnawing in the pit of my stomach again. I wonder if it is better to be the gull who can see the sky but never reach it, or the penguin with only a sea of curious faces as its horizon.
Contact Zones
It's only upon exiting the ecosystems that I find the elusive sloth – or at least a version of him. The basement level of the Biodôme contains a “Discovery Room,” and here the exhibits are much more akin to those in a traditional nature museum. Taxidermied animals look out through glassy eyes behind their display cases, frozen in time. These are the disciplined dead companions to the unruly cacophony upstairs – content to sit still and be examined. Even here, there are appeals to the multisensory – fur pelts that you can run your hands over, a lid you can lift to smell the red fox’s musk (I catch only a faint whiff), or a giant conch shell to put your ear to (I cannot hear the ocean over the chatter of other visitors). I wonder if my senses have been dulled, or if the experience - which would certainly count as surprisingly multisensory in any other museum - simply pales in comparison to the sensory variety of the ecosystems above.
Figure 9: The sloth, holding still.
I wander to the onsite dining hall to debrief with my fellow researchers, and am greeted by a pair of oversized yellow signs that declare – in French and English – that “Human Beings and the Natural World are on a Collision Course.” While aligned with the Biodôme’s message about the urgent need for conservation in the face of human-driven climate change, this sign strikes me as a strange (and somewhat anthropocentric) sentiment for a place so focused on demonstrating the interdependent nature of ecosystems. Though an effective provocation, it suggests that humans are separate from “nature,” rather than thoroughly entangled. On the contrary, our evident vulnerability to the effects of ecosystem collapse and environmental damage only demonstrate that humanity has never had the distance or complete “mastery” over nature that it once claimed. This is true even in the face of the Biodôme’s technological marvel, which would be of little significance if not for the moments of interspecies connection and wonder that it enables.
Figure 10: A stark warning looms over the food court.
In fact, this permeability between “human” and “nature” is part of what animated the redesign of the space. As architect Rami Bebawi (from KANVA) noted in an interview, the Biodôme provokes the question of “whether there is a need to ‘dilute the boundaries between us and them, humans and animals’… which he considers "the most essential responsibility of contemporary architecture’” (Gestalten, 2021 [ “The Story of Montréal’s Living, Breathing Biodôme”]). This aesthetic value is embodied in the membranous translucent skin than KANVA stretched over the bones of the space.
The living inhabitants of the Biodôme are unruly “exhibits” – at times they play with their observers, or they look back (at the human oddities traipsing through their homes), or they hide from view. (See, for example, Sarah Grant’s quest to catch a glimpse of the elusive beavers). Though undoubtedly a feast for the eyes, because the museum’s focus is on conservation rather than pure display, the Biodôme also invites visitors to connect with ecosystems in more-than-visual ways – through feeling the change of air on their skin, smelling the musk of hidden creatures, the loam of the earth or the budding trees, or hearing the trill of birdsong. Even when you cannot see the animals in these spaces, you can feel their presence, and visitors are confronted with the twinned awe and responsibility of sharing an ecosystem with them (however briefly).
The Biodôme is a multisensory as well as a multispecies encounter. As Rosalin Benedict describes, the sensory intensity of the museum’s ecosystems attunes visitors to the sheer aliveness of the world around them. Weaving my way through the museum’s curated lifeworlds, I am reminded, over and over again, of the things we owe each other – not just as the stewards of ecosystems, but as the co-inhabitants of them. This kind of embodied encounter is significant – it generates a contact zone, reminding us of the agency of non-human “others” and our entanglement with them. After all, as the sensory design probes in this section show, the living creatures and atmospheres that animate the Biodôme are not just for looking at, but for being (and becoming) with.
Bibliography
Espace pour la vie (n.d.). About the Biodome. Espace pour la vie. https://espacepourlavie.ca/en/about-biodome
Gestalten (2021). The Story of Montréal’s Living, Breathing Biodôme. Gestalten, May 2021. https://gestalten.com/blogs/journal/the-story-of-montreal-s-living-breathing-biodome
Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ogden, L. A., Hall, B., & Tanita, K. (2013). Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography. Environment and society, 4(1), 5-24.
Pintos, P. (2021). Biodome Science Museum / Kanva. ArchDaily. May 2, 2021. https://www.archdaily.com/960966/biodome-science-museum-kanva