Construction is set to begin this spring on a new Ontario Science Centre, as shown in this rendering provided by the Ontario government, on Toronto’s waterfront.HO/The Canadian Press
The Ontario Science Centre is moving to a new building that is smaller, worse and probably more expensive than the one it is replacing.
This is clear after a Thursday announcement by Premier Doug Ford held at the waterfront Ontario Place, the new site for the science museum. The event named a strong design team to the project: the globally renowned firm Snøhetta with Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects. But it also revealed that the project is tainted. None of the government’s main claims about this new facility appear to be true.
The new project is priced at $1.04-billion over the next 30 years. Of this, design and construction costs make up approximately 75 per cent. This is more than double the $322-million the government initially promised in 2023. It also exceeds the government’s price tag for renovating the existing building in Don Mills.
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So why is this move happening? It forms part of a convoluted larger story. Mr. Ford wants to put his mark on Toronto’s waterfront and is treating it like a life-size, taxpayer-funded Sim City. He signed a deal in 2023 with developer Therme Group to build an overscaled indoor waterpark at Ontario Place, and is now pouring $2-billion into the site largely to serve that project. Moving the Science Centre over gives a pretext for adding a huge parking garage.
And so in 2023, the provincial government suddenly closed the Science Centre’s 1969 building in Don Mills. They claimed its roof posed an immediate danger, which was plainly false: Their own consulting engineers explicitly did not recommend closing the building, but rather fixing it up over 10 years.
Keeping it open, however, would have given Ontarians years to notice what was being lost and how inferior the new centre will be.
Now we know, although the details remain extremely scarce. The new facility includes a building next to Lake Shore Boulevard, and the 1960s “pod” buildings by Zeidler Roberts suspended over Lake Ontario.
The new complex at Ontario Place is approximately 280,000 square feet, according to figures from Premier Doug Ford’s spokesperson.HO/The Canadian Press
The numbers tell the story. The 1969 Science Centre, designed by Moriyama & Teshima Architects, has 568,000 square feet of space, including large workshops to build exhibitions, a planetarium and a tropical rain forest. The new complex at Ontario Place is approximately 280,000 square feet, according to figures from the Premier’s spokesperson Hannah Jensen, and will have none of those things.
The exhibition space has been reduced to 120,000 square feet from 134,000 square feet, Ontario MPP Stan Cho said at the Thursday press conference.
It’s impossible to know how accurate this is. The government refused to provide floor plans, so members of the public can’t truly know how the building will be configured or whether the government is misrepresenting the numbers.
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But we can understand the change, and the loss, at an aesthetic level. The old Science Centre provided a sense of procession. One entered into a grand, cavernlike entry hall, then descended escalators, level by level, into the forest world of the Don Valley. You entered like a bird; at the new centre, one will scuttle in like a rat.
Hiring top-tier architects is presumably the government’s attempt to put some shine on this mess. Inconveniently, Snøhetta’s reputation took a hit last month when they were cited by the American National Labor Review Board for union-busting in their New York office.
Still, the hiring adds credibility: Snøhetta’s 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York demonstrates a fluency with subterranean space. The centre will be as good as possible under the circumstances.
A rending of the interior of the new centre.Supplied
But those circumstances are tough. Ontario Place began as a park dotted with modest buildings. Now, it and the adjacent Exhibition Place are shaping up as a traffic jam of single-use, car-oriented, big-box entertainment venues.
If Queen’s Park was approaching this project in a normal way, we could debate whether this is the right direction for Toronto’s waterfront – and it clearly is not, going as it does against the grain of 50 years of expert advice and plans.
We could ask what will happen to the beloved old building, who will pay for its future transformation and why Ontarians will go at least six years without a proper science centre.
We could ask, too, what it means to dismantle a public institution rather than repair it. The original centre was conceived as an instrument for discovery. Its terraces, bridges and ravine setting turned science into a spatial experience. The new building promises a different kind of education: It is a maze of spin and broken promises.