I am breaking the production rhythm to showcase photography work done around the Montreal Biosphere. The Canada trip itself is designed to allow such breaks to exist, so maybe this is the rhythm all along.
I’ve seen the Biosphere three times today. First a visit to the embedded Environment Museum, then spotting it from Mount Royal at sunset, and later near midnight, coming back to see some Halloween commotion. Same structure, three very different moods: a quiet interior in daylight, a small silhouette against a city going blue, and a dark shell with a crowd milling around its base.
The geodesic design is by Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller. This was the site of the USA Pavilion at the 1967 World Expo, and an Apollo module was on display inside it. The dome originally wore a transparent acrylic skin. A fire in 1976 destroyed the panels, and what remains is the bare, robust, steel lattice. The building outlived the expo and has now become an odd yet integral part of the city’s skyline.
As someone who grew up reading and occasionally writing space station stories, a tiled sky intrinsically tickles some part deep in my mind. A lattice like this is what a habitat ring or an orbital greenhouse looks like from the inside in my head. It is also a symbol of the bygone space age, when a world’s fair pavilion could casually host a spacecraft. You know I’d always chase those (RE the 2025 Concord encounter)
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