Up close and personal at the Ontario Science Centre

Anyone who thinks this building should be knocked down is a liar and a Philistine.

All photos by Lloyd Alter

When I was in high school, I used to enter the Science Fair every year, and when the Ontario Science Centre opened, I would spend March break with my exhibit table on the bridge between the entry and the main building. I got to know many of the staff, and they were incredibly kind and supportive, letting me hang out in the labs down in the valley at the rear of the building.

I would skip school and take the long bus ride in the afternoons to get help on my projects; they even did glassblowing for my rocket engine, shown here on the bridge. I would help them bring in exhibits that kids had trashed. I got to know every inch of that building.

Recently, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the Science Centre would be moved to the waterfront. The infrastructure minister said, “The structure itself has deteriorated,” and “It is falling apart.” They say it will cost too much to repair, and the Premier implied that it would be demolished.

The bridge I used to sit on has been closed since 2022, ruining the entry experience that has been replaced with shuttle buses that take you down to a drab entrance at the rear. I immediately thought of Vince Scully’s great line about Pennsylvania Station in New York: “Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

The OSC was the first major building by Raymond Moriyama and Ted Teshima and is architecturally stunning. When it was built, nobody worried much about the 50,000 tons of upfront carbon emissions released from making all the cement, but we worry today about the concrete going into its unnecessary replacement. And it won’t be a concrete brutalist building of this quality; the simple fact is that we can’t build like this anymore; the CO2 emissions are too high, it is too expensive in this age of value engineering, and the craftspeople who can do it are gone.

And that’s why we should be treasuring the best of the concrete structures we still have.

I biked up to the Science Centre yesterday to join my daughter’s family and get up close to get a sense of the materiality of this building; people should see what we will be losing.

Nobody can afford to do this kind of work anymore; bush-hammering concrete, where you remove the formwork and then hammer the edges off to get the rough finish, is labour-intensive and, frankly, a waste of concrete as the stuff that is knocked off is thrown away. But it’s stunning, inside and out.

There is also a lot of board-formed concrete, where the formwork is built from carefully chosen rough-sawn planks to transfer the texture and form of the wood into the concrete. This isn’t done much anymore because it is expensive and wastes a lot of wood, but it is still beloved by some architects and honoured in Dwell and Dezeen.

What isn’t made of concrete is often brass, like this solid door hardware that is in serious need of some Brasso.

Brass is everywhere, in the handrails, the fire hose cabinets, even the freight elevator doors.

But it is this photo that I think is my most evocative. It’s on the mezzanine down in the exhibit building that many say is just a barn with no value. Here you see a perfect terrazzo floor with brass control strips leading into a curved terrazzo baseboard, often done so that mopping the floor doesn’t lead to water streaking on the wall. Then there is a reveal below a guardrail poured of solid concrete, 8 inches thick. Nobody would invest that kind of money and effort today. You couldn’t find the workers to do such perfect terrazzo. This is essentially irreplaceable. And don’t forget, it is 55 years old and looks as good as the day the building opened.

Nobody would build guards out of 30 inches of solid butcher block wood today.

There is no question that they have scrimped on maintenance; the next time I go I am bringing some brass polish. And whoever got the contract to upgrade the fire alarm system should be electrocuted; there is sloppy crooked conduit stuck everywhere.

With the bridge closed, the great hall is empty and dead.

What we are seeing here is “Demolition by Neglect”–a tried and true practice where you don’t invest in maintenance so that you get to the point where repair is more expensive than replacement. You underinvest in the exhibits so that every year, there are fewer and fewer reasons to visit. You run shuttle buses to destroy the entry experience, even though the costs of operating the buses could likely pay for the bridge. Keep it up long enough, and soon, it can all be sold off to real estate developers, who will no doubt promise to recycle the concrete for their parking garages.

Way down at the end, beyond the restaurant, there are a few relics of the original Science Arcade that was the beating heart of the original Science Centre, when it was the world’s best interactive science museum. These hard-working exhibits have survived 53 years- wheels you can spin, levers you can pull, to learn basic scientific principles. I loved them. My kids loved them, and now my granddaughter loves them. They are well-maintained, and they still work. There is no reason why the same couldn’t be true for the buildings.

I complain about concrete because making cement is responsible for seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. My usual argument for preserving existing buildings is to avoid the upfront carbon emissions from building new ones. We simply cannot afford to build like this anymore. But that’s all the more reason to treasure the best examples of its use. That’s why the Ontario Science Centre is irreplaceable; we shall not look upon its like again.

I used to worry about my daughter’s Twitter handle; I didn’t think one should say such things, even about Doug Ford. But the man is bent on destroying almost everything we love about this city, including Moriyama’s Science Centre and Eb Zeidler’s Ontario Place. I think I may adopt Emma’s middle name.

Also, read Globe and Mail architectural critic Alex Bozikovic: Doug Ford’s plan to move the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place ruins them both and Shawn Micallef: Doug Ford’s party built the Ontario Science Centre. That makes his plan to demolish it even more puzzling.

Also: here is a great post about its history from Robert Moffatt in Toronto Modern: Ontario Science Centre: Raymond Moriyama’s temple of technology