The previous Ontario Science Centre building in Toronto's Don Mills was 568,000 square feet.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Last week, a winter storm dumped snow onto the roof of the former Ontario Science Centre. That could be cause for concern. Last year, provincial officials claimed the beloved building was in bad shape and the roof might collapse. They had to close the place down right away.
That wasn’t exactly true, and the beloved old Science Centre survived last week’s storm in fine shape. But it stood empty, as Doug Ford’s government advanced its destructive plan to move the centre, eventually, to a new building at the waterfront Ontario Place.
To fill the gap of five or more years, the province announced last Wednesday the Science Centre will take space at Harbourfront Centre. But this will be much smaller than advertised, smaller than was promised and a tiny fraction of the size of the original museum.
As with many aspects of the Science Centre story, the government aims to obfuscate the details. An announcement said the facility will occupy 86,000 square feet, about the size of two elementary schools. But this number is bogus. It includes “outdoor program areas.” Subtract those – as one does when talking about buildings, particularly in December.
Then do the math. The previous Science Centre building is 568,000 square feet. It has 160,000 square feet of exhibition space, plus a theatre and Imax cinema. It also has a magnificent sequence of sculptural concrete halls and glassed-in escalators descending into the woodland of the Don Valley.
For now, the Science Centre will occupy leftover rooms in another struggling institution.
Harbourfront Centre, the waterfront cultural campus created by the federal government in the 1970s, has struggled financially of late and has shed space. It now offers programming in only one major building, York Quay Centre. That structure is approximately 75,000 square feet. And most of its public rooms are occupied.
A visit last week confirmed its sad shape. The OSC currently occupies two streetfront rooms with a program that is basically an indoor playground, featuring a few fragments of exhibitions from the larger museum.
The Science Centre was a palace; this by comparison is a conference room at a two-star hotel.
And where, exactly, is a museum’s worth of programming getting crammed in here?
A Harbourfront representative said chief executive Cathy Loblaw was unavailable for an interview, but offered a statement. “We continue to operate with the same footprint of programming across arts, culture, recreation, and learning,” Ms. Loblaw wrote in an e-mail. The provincial Tourism Ministry did not answer detailed questions last week. Move along, folks.
Or look back, instead, and remember that none of this was necessary.
The current chain of events traces back to Ontario Place, where the European “wellness” operator Therme acquired the right to build a stadium-sized indoor waterpark. To accommodate that, the Ford government spent $40-million demolishing an entire island of de facto public parkland. Therme requires parking, so the province is promising a massive above-ground garage on that site. And, at least partly to justify the cost of the parking garage, the province decided to move the Science Centre fully to Ontario Place. Which led to the closing of Moriyama Teshima’s beloved Science Centre in Don Mills.
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Harbourfront has its own problems. It has lost something of its raison d’être as Toronto’s central waterfront has urbanized, and as the organization failed to cater to the thriving neighbourhood around it.
Now the organization will acquire a tenant that will help keep it afloat. But what will be left of Harbourfront in five or 10 years? Ms. Loblaw has already announced her departure.
And what will be left of the Science Centre? The old building, which is empty, needs a new purpose. The new building, if and when it is constructed, will be half the size of the previous building, with roughly 20 per cent less exhibition space.
The old building survived the storm. The institution, and all the values of inquiry and curiosity that it represented, have taken a brutal, senseless blow.