Montreal Museums Day

Whilst fighting through the crowds in Montréal on the annual Museums Day (www.museesmontreal.org), I saw several excellent ideas that I feel should be shared with the science communication community. Firstly, the idea of opening up 40 museums to the public is a formidable one, and the queues I saw for the free shuttle buses and the attractions themselves spoke volumes as a result. Nevertheless it all made a slightly shambolic ordered chaos and people got a flavour of what their city had to offer.

Montreal Museums

What to do with an Olympic Stadium once the summer is over? Montréal’s answer is to move in to create the Biodome (www.museumsnature.ca), creating a tropical forest, temperate forest, underwater/seashore zone and cold zone for visitors. For someone whose country hosts the games in 2012, I think this is an excellent idea and a better lasting memorial than a bulldozer and some new houses.

The Biosphere (www.biosphere.ec.gc.ca), in a different part of Montréal was a testament to sustainable living. Built within a gigantic Buckyball (or Buckminster-fullerene structure) it took the visitor through interactive, child-friendly halls explaining about water, toxic chemicals and so on out to the top and how to make travel less polluting. At the very top was an exhibition about how homes can be made significantly better for us and for the environment; the difference being that this was child-friendly and realistic.

Also visited were the Chateâu Dufresne museum, the Saint Gabriel house (the oldest surviving house in Montréal from 1668) and the McGill University’s Redpath Museum. All the places I saw had outdoor activities for the visitors, an absolute necessity given the sheer volume of the public who had turned out for the event.