Darwin Sect

Darwin Sect is a Belgian design house founded by Florence Samain and Dave Monfort, two naturalists whose work sits between design, craft and natural history. The studio began with preserved butterflies and insects mounted inside glass domes in the Napoleonic style, objects conceived as a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, later extended to living organisms.

Its best-known project is the Darwin Tank, a cylindrical borosilicate glass aquarium designed to host jellyfish: the dome works as a lens, magnifying the animals and casting their shadows across the room, while a StreamMaker unit developed with the von Karman Institute keeps the water moving without pulling the jellyfish into the filters. Launched on Kickstarter, the tank is produced in Belgium and sold internationally, with lighting, filtration and feeding systems in the base.