Archinect - News

A look inside Montreal’s award-winning Insectarium

2023-06-09T11:47:00-04:00

An architectural team composed of Kuehn Malvezzi, Pelletier de Fontenay, and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architects has been awarded the Grand Prix d’excellence en architecture from the Ordre des architectes du Québec for their Metamorphosis of the Montreal Insectarium.

Main façade and Pollinator. Photo credit: James Brittain — Kuehn Malvezzi / Pelletier de Fontenay / Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes in consortium

The project underwent a seven-year design and construction period before opening on April 13th, 2022. Featuring hundreds of insect species and detailed displays, the center also holds an immersive sensory labyrinth experience, a pollinator garden, creative workshops, and production areas.

Entrance Hall. Photo credit: James Brittain — Kuehn Malvezzi / Pelletier de Fontenay / Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes in consortium

The insectarium is part of ...

Brighton passes planning condition requiring new buildings to feature bee bricks

2022-01-24T15:56:00-05:00

An initiative in Brighton aimed at helping protect the bee population could do more harm than good, scientists have warned. The council in Brighton has passed a planning condition that means any new building more than five metres high will have to include swift boxes and special bricks with holes known as bee bricks. They will provide nesting and hibernating space for solitary bees.

The mandate was first proposed in 2019 and then attached to all planning permissions after April 1, 2020. As reported by The Guardian, scientists warn that this move may not result in a notable difference for biodiversity, with some arguing that it could actually harm bees if the holes aren’t properly maintained or if they attract mites.

Others have asserted that the bricks don’t need to be cleaned because there will be beneficial microbes in the holes and bees possess natural hygienic behavior. It is clear that further research is required in order to better understand the costs and benefits to implementing these bee bricks. One professor believes Brighton’s planning condition will provide a good opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of the bricks on a wide enough scale over an extended period of time before thinking of employing it elsewhere.

What ants can teach us about the Eiffel Tower

2017-07-18T17:36:00-04:00

Scientists at Georgia Tech were trying to figure out how ants built themselves into towers to escape confinement or danger. They put a small pole in the middle of a dishful of ants and filmed what happened. The ants, they found, climb upwards, on top of each other, until they find an empty spot. Then they stop. The next one does the same, and so on.

Alexander McQueen, rebel of the fashion world renowned for his wildly imaginative designs, always said that there is no better designer than nature. Through billions of years of evolution, life's products, so to speak, have been extensively prototyped, market tested, upgraded and refined. So, it is no wonder then why creative minds increasingly turn to nature to look for innovative design solutions.

Often referred to as biomimicry, the discipline has had a growing presence in the field of architectural design. With a recent study from Georgia Institute of Technology on how fire ants form towers, the architectural world has a new potential take away from nature. Done simply through trial-and-error, the fire ants create bell shaped structures by climbing on top of each other until they find an empty spot, at which point they stop. Each ant supports only three others above them, creating a structure where each ant bears the same load and the results look a lot like the famed Eiffel To...

"Poissy Galore" artfully frames green public space on the banks of the Seine

2017-01-05T13:27:00-05:00

Situated in Carrière-Sous-Poissy in France along the River Seine, "Poissy Galore" by Armengaud Armengaud Cianchetta (AAC) and Herlach Hartmann Frommenwiler (HHF) is designed primarily as an ecological public space for both Parisian residents and far-flung visitors. Consisting of an observatory, an insect museum and a visitor center, the project title is an apt play on the James Bond film, both in terms of its expansiveness and playfulness. The inventive timber construction and visually arresting angular framing is as much a part of the project's allure as its nuanced integration into its 113 hectare site.

As the architects explain, "With the exception of the observatory, which is a steel construction, the collection of pavilions and small 'follies' is based on a modular wood system, repeating and combining different sized and angled timber frames."

In addition to the public spaces, the project also has private offices and storage, including facilities to raise insects.

The latest in F...

Princely pests: new study reveals wealthier homes tend to host more insect species

2016-08-04T13:58:00-04:00

When it comes to cleanliness, common sense suggest wealthier homes are at an advantage. Live-in maids and cleaning services should, ostensibly, help create antiseptic, exclusively human enclosures. Yet new research shows there’s a correlation between socioeconomics and the presence of bugs in the home: more affluent neighborhoods host a greater number of species than lower-income areas.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: more green space means more plants that harbor insects. In fact, socioeconomics impacts diversity across the board, with higher affluence associated with more birds, bats, reptiles, etc.

Humans don’t live aside “nature”, but are an integral and influential force in ecology. Despite all our pesticides and cleaning products, our homes are entangled in a mesh of bacteria, fungi, plants, insects, and animals. According to the study, the average home hosts about 100 species of arthropods, ie. insects and spiders

"Our houses are really permeable and dynamic,” s...

Modular Cricket Pod Lets You Create An Urban Insect Farm

2016-05-02T18:40:00-04:00

Walking up to the Cricket Shelter—a new tent-like structure sitting on a dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—it might not immediately be obvious that it's full of bugs. But inside pods lining the walls, the prototype is raising 22,000 crickets. Why? To eat, of course.

Terreform ONE has been working on combining food and shelter to solve the United Nations challenge on world hunger.

The future of urban farming belongs to the bugs

2014-06-13T13:21:00-04:00

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs. Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs.

Walter Tschinkel's Aluminum Casts of Ant Colonies Reveals Insect Architecture

2012-10-10T10:03:00-04:00

Retiree Walter R. Tschinkel is an entomologist and former professor of Biological Science at Florida State University. He recognizes ants as "some of nature's grand architects" and, curious to understand their self-created habitats, devised a clever (if cruel) way to do it: By pouring molten aluminum down into the hole. ... after the aluminum cools... he unearths these wondrous, chandelier-esque shapes revealing the alien architectures of the colony.

Animal architecture: Rescued bee colony gets new waterfront home

2012-06-21T14:10:00-04:00

A massive and thriving colony of bees living in an abandoned industrial site in Buffalo has been moved into a brand new home, designed for them by architecture graduate students in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.