The Ontario government has been adamant that building a new Science Centre at Ontario Place will be preferable to reinvesting in the Ontario Science Centre at its current site. But such an assessment does not hold up to scrutiny.
In past articles, I have examined how the cost of repairing the existing Ontario Science Centre is far less than the cost of building a new, half-sized science centre at Ontario Place. I’ve also looked at how a new science centre will not be ready until 2030-2034, depriving a full generation of Ontario kids and parents from a full science centre experience.
The current article takes a more granular look at the architectural details of a new science centre, based on currently available information, and what would be lost compared to reinvesting in the existing Ontario Science Centre.
An 18%-56% reduction in exhibition space
The government claims that the current Ontario Science Centre is inefficient in its layout, and that therefore, even though the new Ontario Science Centre has half the footprint, it will have a comparable amount of exhibition space.
But as the Auditor General has confirmed, the current Ontario Science Centre is 568,000 square feet in size, with 134,000 square feet of exhibitions. The proposed centre at Ontario Place is 275,700 square feet, with 110,000 square feet of indoor exhibit space—18% less than at the current Science Centre.
The amount of exhibition space in the proposed centre risks being reduced even further, considering that several key spaces have not been accounted for properly in the government’s preliminary calculations.
In the test fit, school intake, lockers, classrooms, unloading zones, first aid, storage, and exhibition maintenance and prep areas—some 23,226 square feet of functional program in all—were located in the P1 and P2 parking levels. However, as the design of these parking areas has evolved, the allocated space has been given over to other essential logistical needs, including a large underground bus drop-off loop and bicycle parking. As a result, these program elements will need to be accommodated in the above-ground portions of the building.
Another inconsistency is that in the business case, the heritage pods have been counted as being 100% usable space—adding up to some 40,000 square feet—whereas in reality, they will need to contain washrooms, exit stairs, mechanical areas, and corridors. In the test fit, some of these items begin to be blocked in, and the gross area comes in at 32,662 square feet—7,338 square feet less than originally anticipated.
In all, this adds up to another 30,564 square feet of space that is “missing” from the space planning calculations for the centre at Ontario Place. If this space come out of the exhibition areas directly, this means that the exhibition space would be reduced to just under 80,000 square feet—a 41% reduction from the current Ontario Science Centre.
In the relocation business case, exhibitions for the proposed science centre are not fully funded. According to this document, there will be no exhibitions in three of the five pods on opening day—some 20,408 square feet of exhibition. This means that when the proposed science centre at Ontario Place opens, it will have under 60,000 square feet of exhibition space—56% less than the current Ontario Science Centre.
In the currently available drawings, the 130-metre-long underground tunnel linking the science pavilion to the pods is labelled as “Pavilion Gallery Space.” Even though this is far from the optimal location for exhibitions, this comprises some 20,000 square feet of space that may to be “counted” as part of the Ontario Place location’s overall exhibition space. Accordingly, when the proposed science centre at Ontario Place opens, a third of its exhibition space may in reality be lower-quality space, on a basement level, that does triple-duty as a major circulation pathway, building flex space, and exhibition space.
Missing feature areas
What goes by the wayside when a Science Centre’s overall area is reduced by 50%, and its exhibition spaces are significantly reduced? Within the relocation business case, a few key areas are identified. To start, the new centre will not have a large immersive space that replicates the experience of the TELUS Rainforest. Even the business case admits that “this creates a gap in the overall science centre experience,” adding that “a unique and fully immersive experience is what helps create a world class tourist destination.”
There will be no adventure playground, equivalent to the Cohon Family Nature Escape and Science Plaza at the current Ontario Science Centre. “The new OSC@OP has limited outdoor space envisioned in the current plans,” the business case admits.
The planetarium, which was expected to reopen this year, will also be excluded from the new centre. “An immersive state-of-the-art modern New Planetarium is core to the science centre experience,” the report says. “Planetariums are not just for young learners,” it explains. “They welcome everyone from the community to attend public events. A state-of-the-art spectacular planetarium has the potential to engage researchers as scholars interested in engaging with the public.”
A fabrication facility, too, is absent from the plans for a new centre. Creating exhibitions is part of the Ontario Science Centre’s core mandate. It’s also part of the Science Centre’s magic: there is an immediate feedback loop from the exhibition floor to the workshop, that allows the Science Centre’s exhibition designers and fabricators to hone their work in response to visitor behaviour. Observers have noted how this design process would not be nearly as fulsome with an off-site fabrication facility.
The current facility generates $2.5-3 million annually from exhibition sales and rentals. The government’s own pricing anticipates that leasing an appropriate space will cost $420,000 to $690,000 per year, plus an initial design and fit-out cost. While it notes that “ideally there is some proximity to the OP precinct,” the industrial spaces it prices out in its business case are chosen for their proximity to the 400-series highways—not to Ontario Place.
More missing areas
Moriyama Teshima Architects, the firm that designed the original Ontario Science Centre, has compared the size of each major program component in the current Ontario Science Centre with the proposed centre.
In terms of public space, the IMAX theatre increases substantially in size, doubling its capacity from 300 to 600 seats. This is more space where it is not needed: while a large IMAX theatre may be useful for occasional evening premieres, the bread-and-butter of the Science Centre’s IMAX is frequent, daytime showings for smaller audiences. Even the relocation business case notes that the larger “capacity is rarely likely to be reached.”
Almost everything else goes down in size: the building entry and visitor amenities shrink by 43% from 46,200 square feet to 26,650 square feet, education spaces are reduced a whopping 88% from 11,700 square feet to 2,600 square feet, and the OSC School disappears entirely, as do dedicated event and rental spaces.
The lack of education spaces is particularly concerning: it will certainly mean the elimination of special immersive STEM programs geared to high school groups, such as the popular Voyage to Mars and Return to the Moon. The webpage for the OSC School—a specialized program that allows grade 12 students to spend a full semester at the Ontario Science Centre—has already been taken down.
In addition to the noted 18-56% reduction in dedicated exhibition areas, the support space for those exhibitions is reduced by 38%, while overall building support spaces are reduced by 85%, and administrative spaces by 58%. The loss of support space is notable since the hallmark of an interactive science museums is the “host” concept, where staff interact with visitors, and provide demonstrations and assistance in interpreting exhibits. This program requires space both within and outside of the exhibit spaces for prep, storage and staff needs. The dramatic reduction in support spaces, along with proposed reductions of staff by at least 17% in the business case, indicates that this essential aspect of the science centre program will undoubtedly be compromised.
As mentioned in the last section of this analysis, exhibition design and fabrication spaces are absent from the proposed centre. This area is often used as part of “behind the scenes” public tours—another part of the visitor experience which will be lost in the proposed relocation to Ontario Place.
While it makes sense that some areas would shrink in a half-sized science centre, one would anticipate that if the intention was to maintain exhibition spaces at the current size, then the same size of support spaces for those exhibitions would also be required. Moreover, the business plan for a new science centre is premised on growing attendance by 50%—an indication that visitor amenities would need to expand, rather than shrinking by 43%.
From personal experience, the current Science Centre’s cafeteria space is already at capacity on weekends. It is hard to understand how a significantly smaller cafeteria could hope to accommodate a significantly greater number of visitors. In a recent summer trip to Montreal, I visited the Montreal Science Centre, which did not have an operating cafeteria and also had little by way of dedicated student intake area in evidence. At lunchtime, my child and I were obliged to walk through the rain throughout the Old Port area looking for a food concession. In any case, we would have had trouble making our way into the science centre in any case, since the entry area was blocked by summer campers eating brown-bag lunches throughout the hallways—the kind of scenario that would be common in a Ontario Place science centre with insufficient student and visitor support spaces.
Urban design
But what would the proposed science centre at Ontario Place look like? While there are no renderings available, we can get some sense of the answer by considering the immediate context.
Although Ontario Place as a whole is large, the proposed science centre would occupy a relatively constrained site between two private developments: the Therme indoor water theme park and spa, and the enlarged 29,000-capacity LiveNation venue. The Therme development has a footprint of 8.4 acres, comparable to the footprint of the SkyDome. The proposed Science Pavilion’s footprint on the mainland is 88% smaller—about the size of that baseball stadium’s infield.
Detailed plans are not yet available for the LiveNation venue, but its new footprint will be of a similar scale to the Therme development, as seen in publicly available site diagrams.
Architect Brian Rudy of Moriyama & Teshima Architects describes the situation like this: “This diagram strikes me as the most blatant representation of the problem: the massive Therme on one side, the huge future expansion of Live Nation on the other side—with the half-sized science centre squashed in the middle, almost literally as an afterthought. The science centre is like several leftover and insufficient bits & pieces of ill-arranged garnish, sandwiched between two slices of bloated and soggy white bread.” He adds: “How can the science centre possibly stand on its own to create its own identity—let-alone create an environment for inspiration and learning—in this location, squished between these two giant money generators?”
The Science Pavilion occupies a constrained site, against Lakeshore Boulevard and the Martin Goodman trail to the north, and Lake Ontario to the south. There are two entrances to the Pavilion: a car drop-off to the east, and an entrance off an outdoor plaza to the west. (The same outdoor plaza also gives access to the Therme project). Even though some reports say that the building is four storeys high, the “roof” includes a substantial built-up portion, so the true height of the building is five storeys. Overall, it will be around 115 feet tall—almost twice as high as the 60-foot-tall Cinesphere.
The moniker “pavilion” is somewhat deceptive, since “pavilion” usually indicates a low-slung, one-storey-high building. Instead, the science building will essentially form an opaque wall between Lakeshore Boulevard and the waterfront. While this means that the building will block views of the heritage Cinesphere and Pods, the Science Pavilion’s wedge shape allows for glimpses of those structures from Lakeshore Boulevard and the Martin Goodman trail, approaching Ontario Place from the east. From the west, views of the Cinesphere and Pods will be blocked by the Therme development.
In the original proposal, the Science Pavilion sits atop a five-storey, 2,000-car underground parkade meant to serve Ontario Place as a whole, including dedicated parking spots that the province is obliged to provide under its signed lease with Therme. (It is anticipated that the lease agreement with LiveNation will similarly require dedicated spots.) And while there is some discussion about this site-wide parking moving across the street to Exhibition Place, the need will likely remain for the Science Pavilion and Therme entrance pavilion to include two underground levels.
This is because of several shared services that take place in that underground area: notably, a double-height bus drop-off loop, shipping/receiving zones for both the science centre and Therme, and an underground car drop-off zone for Therme. While for many buildings, such services are located at street level, the tightness of the Ontario Place site makes these functions virtually impossible to accommodate anywhere expect underground.
The P1 level also includes an underground link, which would allow for science centre visitors to connect to the exhibition-containing Pods and Cinesphere without exiting the ticketed zone. After traveling through the link, visitors would pop up into a tower squeezed next to the Therme entrance pavilion, from which a bridge crosses over to the elevated pods.
Visitor Journey
As a visitor to a science centre at Ontario Place, you would be dropped off at the east entrance or underground, travel through three floors of exhibitions, then travel through a tunnel and/or series of bridges to see the pods and Cinesphere.
Off the bat, there are some aspects of this journey that are less than ideal. IMAX theatres are typically located near the entrance of science centres, rather than at the end: this allows people to access them as a separate attraction, and also to more easily select a show time without having to account for finding and making one’s way to the theatre. (As a mother with a young kid, I can tell you that making it to a ticketed show, at an unknown distance, for a specific timeslot can be significantly challenging.)
Moriyama Teshima’s office has performed a helpful exercise of diagramming out what this visitor journey would look like, in comparison to a visitor journey at the current Ontario Science Centre. In the current Ontario Science Centre, a one-way trip that includes all of the exhibitions entails a 730 metre walk. In the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, that same trip would be 1.3 kilometres long—almost twice the distance—to see less exhibit space. While good for those counting steps, a longer journey can create accessibility issues: creating an additional burden to those with mobility issues (such as grandparents) or those with strollers (such as parents with kids under the age of 4). It’s an additional measure that points to a poorer experience for visitors.
A risky proposition
The inclusion of a 130-metre-long underground tunnel and some 400 metres of bridges not only creates for a long visitor journey, but it makes the building vulnerable to future major repair requirements.
As architect Brian Rudy explains: “As we have seen, the existing Ontario Science Centre had a vulnerability when the bridge between Buildings A and B was deemed unsafe and closed to the public. While we may debate why the province didn’t immediately set to fixing this 60-metre-long bridge, imagine the vulnerability of the approximately 400 metres of bridge as part of the OP proposal, and then also consider that this bridge is already over 50 years old.” He adds, “Speaking of vulnerabilities, also imagine a 130-metre-long tunnel built right next to—and 2.5 metres below the waters of Lake Ontario [as it is shown on in current sections]. Are we confident that the provincial government 50 years in the future will be willing to invest in a 50-year-old leaky tunnel?”
Rudy also notes that the presence of so many bridges makes for a very inefficient structure—echoing the Province’s key criticism of the existing building. The Province wrote in its business case that “the 568,000 square feet of the [current Ontario Science Centre] is expansive and spread across three buildings and multiple levels, creating a highly inefficient structure…[resulting] in a significant amount of inefficient spaces.” Says Rudy: “While it is hard to argue that the existing Ontario Science Centre is the most efficient building in the world, the Ontario Place proposal will almost certainly be less efficient than the existing Ontario Science Centre—given its constrained five-story pavilion footprint, long tunnels, and bridges connecting relatively small spaces over a vast area. This lack of efficiency will cost more to build, cost more to maintain over the long run, and likely result in further compromises and reductions of usable (ie. exhibition) space.”
Customized design vs. P3
As with most endeavours, the process affects the product. In the case of the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, the architectural outcome will largely be related to the way it is procured: through a public-private-partnership, or P3.
A traditional procurement model for a building is straightforward: the client (Infrastructure Ontario and the Ontario Science Centre) would vet a number of architects, then choose one to work with in designing a building to suit their needs and the site. As part of this process, other sub-consultants, such as engineers and heritage specialists, are brought onto the team. When the design is complete, contractors are invited to bid on constructing the project. This is how all museums and cultural facilities in Ontario and Canada have been designed to-date.
Introduced in 2005 in Ontario, the P3 model is typically used for large infrastructure projects and buildings, including highways, hospitals, courthouses, and sporting venues. In this model, Infrastructure Ontario first vets and hires a compliance architect, who puts together a master specification, known as the Project-Specific Outcome Specification (PSOS). Instead of dictating the final design, this is intended to be a general specification that lists all of the project’s requirements, but doesn’t foreclose opportunities for saving money through a creative solution to those requirements.
Three teams—each consisting of a contractor, architect, and subconsultants such as engineers—are then invited to submit bids that include the price to design, build, finance, and maintain the project for a specified number of years. Once the winning team is selected, they are responsible for the full execution of the project.
In theory, this process results in competitive bidding, taxpayer savings, and the transfer of risk to the private sector. But as auditor general Bonnie Lysk pointed out in a report nine years ago, this is not the reality of how P3s have played out. Because the private sector is taking on financing costs at a higher cost than the public sector, is responsible for higher ancillary costs (such as legal, engineering, and project management fees), and tends to over-price project risks, Lysk concluded that the cost of the 74 projects taken on between 2005-2015 was 29% higher than if the same projects had been managed through traditional procurement—costing the government an additional eight billion dollars that decade.
Yet, P3s remain attractive to governments. This is largely because, despite evidence to the contrary, they still have the appearance of carrying taxpayer savings. In a Design-Build-Finance-Maintain contract—the kind being used for the proposed Ontario Place—project costs are paid for in installments over a long period, usually 30 years. This means that a project can be started while putting little cost on the government’s books, with the majority of costs ultimately passed along to future governments.
For architects, the downsides of P3s are well-known. Bidding for a P3 can involve a massive amount of work that isn’t sufficiently compensated—a significant financial gamble for any office. The selection process generally weighs heavily on the side of lowest cost, rather than the most innovative design. As a member of the winning proponent team, architects work for a developer, not for the building’s users. Often they have little direct contact with the client. On both proponent and compliance sides, reams of paperwork can bog down a project’s progress—as well as the morale of employees.
Many players in the industry feel that overall, P3s also represent poor value for the built environment. With few exceptions, P3 projects fall short of the architectural quality that might have been achieved with a comparable budget, under a traditional stipulated-sum contract.
Because of its complex preparatory setup and legalistic nature, the P3 process also has a longer timeline than traditional projects.
For the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, the government has so far completed the selection of a compliance architect. An RFQ was issued for proponent teams last spring, with submissions due on July 4; an RFP with the completed PSOS is expected to be issued to the finalist teams in early November. At this rate, a proponent team would not be selected until 2025 or 2026. Construction documents and approvals would still need to be completed from that point. Optimistically, construction would not be finished until 2030, with exhibition installation and commissioning taking some months longer.
This timeline correlates with the government’s RFP for a temporary science centre location, which asks for a lease going until 2030, with the possibility of yearly extensions until 2034. As I have written, the only plausible explanation for this long lease is that the Province does not expect the OSC at Ontario Place to be open until 2030-2034—not 2028, as they have been telling the public.
Reopen, renew, and reinvest
Overall, a new science centre at Ontario Place will be a shadow of what we have at the Ontario Science Centre’s current location. It will have significantly less exhibition space, will lack key feature areas, and will lose other important program areas, including educational spaces, event rental areas, the OSC school, and support spaces.
The proposed science centre at Ontario Place will be compressed on its site, where it will be dwarfed by the private Therme and LiveNation developments. It will necessitate a visitor journey that is twice the length, to see fewer exhibits. The P3 process by which it is being constructed will mean poorer quality architecture, delivered on a longer timeline.
The Moriyama-designed building was closed less than two months ago, and while reopening it and performing necessary repairs will take some doing, it can happen more quickly than preparing a temporary location (which would not open until 2026) or pursuing a relocation to Ontario Place (which would not open until 2030-2034).
The right decision is clear: Ontario must reopen, renew, and reinvest in the Ontario Science Centre at its current location.
Related:
As Province edges towards demolition of Science Centre, documents point to a manufactured crisis
Cost of Ontario Science Centre temporary location exceeds cost of roof repairs
Ontario Science Centre doesn’t require full closure: A close reading of the engineers’ report
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