The ever-popular, hair-raising Van de Graaff generator demonstrates static electricity for an audience at the Ontario Science Centre in 1970.JOHN WOOD/The Globe and Mail
Ivan Semeniuk is The Globe and Mail’s national science reporter.
Some day, if anyone excavates the Toronto house my wife and I renovated more than 20 years ago, they may find a small plastic box buried in the dirt under the basement floor. This is our time capsule, with contents chosen to give those who follow us a sense of who once lived in there.
Along with a folded front page from The Globe and Mail and other items, the time capsule’s discoverer will find a pair of laminated photo ID cards from our days on staff at the Ontario Science Centre – linked by a keychain that was made by a Science Centre robot, no less.
The cards will preserve for posterity what we looked like in our younger days. They will also say something about the grand and quirky institution where we met and spent a collective 23 years. For us, as for many others, the Science Centre became part of the personal “why” of our lives, something that we carry and that continues to matter, many years and professional roles later.
What we didn’t know when we buried our time capsule is how much the larger “why” of the Science Centre – its significance to the people of Ontario and the world – would become obscured by the battle over its future.
This has been evident since the Science Centre was shuttered on June 21 for reasons that now look far less supportable than the deteriorating roof the Ford government says necessitated the move. (I write this as someone whose desk was leaked on with some regularity. We managed the situation then with a network of latex tubing borrowed from the Science Centre’s cryogenics show, until the roof could be fixed.)
The public conversation that followed the Science Centre’s closing has been heavy with nostalgia and with platitudes about new chapters and fresh starts. What has received less attention is the precise nature and magnitude of the Science Centre’s loss to the people and culture of Ontario.
The provincial government that built what was once called the Centennial Centre for Science and Technology 55 years ago may have never fully understood its creation. There has always something subversive about the place – a playful irreverence that is part of the Science Centre’s DNA and that helped to make it so appealing to visitors. But it would come with a need for continuous redefinition and renewal that created a built-in identity crisis for the Centre and made it easier for others, including bureaucrats holding the purse strings, to undervalue its purpose.
Globe and Mail publisher Oakley Dalgleish was among those credited with promoting the vision of a new museum to highlight Canada’s contributions to science and industrial innovation. In 1963, Dalgleish put the idea to a young Bill Davis, then the province’s education minister. The plan took wing, but Dalgleish, who died of a heart attack that year, did not live to see Ontario premier John Robarts announce in 1964 that the province’s centennial project would be a science and technology museum located on undeveloped parkland in Toronto’s Don River valley.
At that time anyone looking for guidance as to what such a museum might contain would be directed to examples such as Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry or the Deutsches Museum in Munich. These are museums known for their collections of historic artifacts chronicling the march of technological progress.
But Ontario’s project took a decidedly more radical turn. Influenced by the possibilities and spirit of the era, it shifted in concept from a museum of display cases and dioramas to one that emphasized learning through hands-on exhibits.
This was an exciting development and a reflection of the youthful exuberance that was transforming Canada’s national identity – the same energetic optimism that made Expo 67 in Montreal a cultural turning point. Rather than a lesser version of something already in existence, the Ontario Science Centre was to become a birthplace for a new kind of museum experience. Together with San Francisco’s Exploratorium, which opened its doors at the same time, the Science Centre developed an interactive approach that was to be adopted and emulated in cities around the world.
The team that brought this approach to life was initially led by the Science Centre’s first head of design, Taizo Miake, an instructor at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Wis., who arrived in Toronto with a cohort of seven former students and young industrial designers. Their role would be to work with science and engineering experts to turn ideas into workable exhibits that would intrigue and delight visitors.
Behind the scenes, the resulting creative tension between science and design became a defining feature of the institution and its sometimes-fractious organizational culture. But visitors were the ultimate arbiters of what succeeded on the exhibit floor. Even before the Science Centre was built, school groups were brought in to interact with exhibits under development at a nearby industrial site. From the outset, they helped to establish that the Science Centre was fundamentally in the business of creating experiences.
That mission was to benefit from the unique building that was taking shape to house those experiences.
Raymond Moriyama’s design for the Ontario Science Centre coalesced around an ambitious three-building concept.Moriyama Teshima Architects
In an inspired move, the province in 1964 had given the task of designing the Science Centre to a 34-year-old architect named Raymond Moriyama.
Mr. Moriyama’s design coalesced around an ambitious three-building concept that reflected the natural landscape of the site. It featured a long reception building on the lip of the valley connected by a glass and concrete bridge to a dramatic tower section and Great Hall. For visitors, the bridge would serve as both a transition and an invitation to the Science Centre’s wonders. Finally, the bulk of the Science Centre consisted of a series of large exhibit halls that were accessed via a memorable, three-escalator ride down the slope of the valley into the heart of the experience.
Later, exhibition developers would sometimes struggle to fit their plans into Mr. Moriyama’s distinctive package. It was no blank slate, but it called for both richness and variety. And like a modernist version of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school, the building’s architectural idiosyncrasies inspired novel uses and provided places where a diverse set of characters could interact with the public, from telescope makers and ham-radio operators to artists and naturalists.
This is relevant to the current debate about whether the Science Centre can exist without its signature home. Any answer has to start with the premise that it’s the quality of the experience, not square footage, that makes a science centre great. But what Mr. Moriyama’s building provided was more than space. It was a confluence of people, place and purpose that would be impossible to recreate in the same way if only because we are now in a different era.
New science centres can be built, but legacies must be grown. In its scale and scope, the Ontario Science Centre was a grand vision that became a global template. To those who know it best, the idea of separating it from its iconic setting without losing its essential character sounds as workable as moving Niagara Falls. Whatever else could be created today – by a province whose track record of neglect has brought the Science Centre we already have to the brink – it won’t be a replacement. . It will be something different, and almost certainly something a lot less interesting.
When I began working at the Science Centre in 1984 while still a student, I was surprised to discover how much more there was to the place that the public did not see. It included spaces for designers, researchers and prototype developers. There were voluminous workshops where skilled tradespeople built the exhibits, including all their components from mechanical gears to electronics, the cabinetry that housed them, and the copy panels and graphics that adorned them. The Science Centre was its own world, and I learned that it was kept in orbit by a secret village of highly talented workers representing an astonishing array of skills.
Importantly, the province’s plans make no commitment to housing or retaining the content experts, exhibit developers, designers and fabricators that have filled the Science Centre with meaningful experiences over its history. To do this over and over again, in a way that can withstand handling by millions of visitors, requires a rare and highly specialized set of capabilities that made Ontario famous in the museum world and created a regional hub of companies and designers that have built on the Science Centre’s expertise. Exchanging that for a generic exhibition space and an off-the-shelf copy of what the Science Centre once pioneered would be a poor trade indeed, even if it comes with a pretty view of Toronto’s waterfront.
Also in jeopardy is another form of cultural influence that the Science Centre has generated to a degree far beyond what its first generation of creators imagined. Once it was opened and its exhibit halls were swarming with one million visitors a year it became both performance space and test bed for an army of young interpreters and demonstrators who were hired to facilitate the public’s experience.
Donning lab coats for visibility, they mingled and charmed the crowds with curiosities and puzzles, upending stereotypes about what it means to be a scientist and who can be one. With humour, curiosity and compassion, these staff members, called “hosts,” coaxed visitors to open their minds to the ideas underlying the exhibits.
Mr. Moriyama’s design provided access to the natural landscape of the Don Valley ravine site.James Brittain/Moriyama Teshima Architects
What emerged from these encounters became the equivalent of a graduate school for science communication, and it set the foundations for a new kind of profession. I was among those who began my career this way and then worked for several more years as one of the Science Centre’s in-house experts, developing exhibits and programs, always with the visitor experience in mind. Many more who got their start on the floor of the Science Centre found it an ideal training ground for careers in education, media and other roles that continue to influence how knowledge is transferred and how science is regarded and talked about in Canadian culture.
Some of the Science Centre’s best-known alumni include Bob McDonald, long-time host of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks, and Anthony Morgan, who became co-host of CBC Television’s The Nature of Things in 2022. As broadcasters, their careers span more than a generation, but they share a common origin story. In describing his Science Centre roots, Mr. Morgan nails the appeal of hosting, and of what it means to be in the business of blowing people’s minds with science as the detonator.
“That moment when you get to see the world change a little bit in somebody’s eyes is magic,” he said.
The skills that came from working the Science Centre floor – using a Van de Graaff generator to make someone’s hair stand on end, liquid nitrogen to shatter a flower or a high-powered laser to burn a visitor’s initials into a piece of wood – have proved to be translatable far beyond the world of science communication. The province can thank the Science Centre for helping actors, comedians, filmmakers, doctors, entrepreneurs and a legion of teachers to develop their abilities.
For Kelly Stadelbauer, a nurse and former chief executive of the Association of Ontario Midwives who worked as a senior host at the Science Centre, the philosophy she absorbed there “showed me how to make information interesting and accessible to all ages and education levels – and that empowers people in their own lives.”
Globe and Mail science reporter Ivan Semeniuk is seen as a Science Centre employee circa 1988, running the museum’s planetarium.Courtesy Ivan Semeniuk
In my case, the Science Centre became an essential precursor to becoming a successful science journalist. It required me to think hard about how to explain complicated things to an audience not forced to study the material for a test. Now, many years and thousands of stories later, I can still feel my Science Centre wiring buzzing in my head as I try to present concepts such as dark matter or CRISPR gene editing. It is the Science Centre that taught me that when someone feels lost or overwhelmed by an explanation, it’s the explainer who bears the responsibility.
Beyond its export of stellar communicators, the Science Centre has also served the province in a different way by creating a meeting place at the crossroads of science, technology, art and history. While Toronto has other cultural institutions and focal points, none captures the same spectrum of interests, ages and activities as the Science Centre in its fullest imagining.
J. Tuzo Wilson, the renowned Canadian geophysicist who was the institution’s director-general during the 1970s and 80s, embodied the image of the Science Centre as a playground for both body and mind. It was during his tenure in 1982 that the Centre mounted China: 7000 Years of Discovery, one of its best-attended and significant special exhibitions.
With Mr. Moriyama’s architecture as its inspirational backdrop, the world view that the Science Centre came to reflect was cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural, equally inviting to personalities as diverse as neurologist Oliver Sacks, astronomer Carl Sagan, actor Nichelle Nichols and “Weird Al” Yankovic.
The Science Centre was never meant to be an amusement hall, or an intellectual salon. Its strength lies in blending elements of these and more. In its effort to dispense with the past, the province may succeed in eliminating the Science Centre’s future as a cultural institution. What is at risk is not just a building; it is the Science Centre’s existential message that curiosity is foundational to a meaningful life and a vibrant society.
Past exhibits at the Science Centre included the Kaleidoscope Room, left, and the A.B.C. of Computer Operation.PHOTOS COURTESY OF ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTRE
When the Science Centre opened in September, 1969, it was two years late and cost $30-million, five times what had initially been estimated. But reviews were buoyant and visitors lined up to try the exhibits.
In the first line of a commemorative book produced for the opening, CBC’s Lister Sinclair, as erudite a voice as Canadian media has ever produced, wrote: “The story of Science is the story of change and evolution.”
Years later I had the task of escorting Mr. Sinclair to the Science Centre’s 20th birthday celebration.
As we crossed the bridge and entered the Great Hall, he sighed and expressed his disappointment that the Science Centre had not quite evolved into what he and others had imagined it could be when it opened its doors.
As someone who by then was familiar with the challenge of keeping the place running, I could sympathize. What matters most about the Science Centre is its unrealized potential. That is what is needed, and what closing the Science Centre has curtailed. At its core it relies on physical interactions with the material world and human contact in real time to open the door to thought and personal development. In an age when we are increasingly partitioned by our screens and distracted by simulations of reality and intelligence, it seems imperative to have a place that invites us to look behind the curtain.
When the building opened, The Globe and Mail said in an editorial that “we have a right to expect something special.” Whatever becomes of the Ontario Science Centre in the months and years ahead, that much has not changed.