This just in, 9 cities will have the opportunity to bid for the proposed re-location of the Canada Science and Technology Museum!
j/k
We have the technology ... but nowhere to show it off
In 1967, Canada's national science museum opened in a bakery. Four decades later, it's still there.
Tom Spears
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, November 15, 2007
You think you know the Canada Science and Technology Museum -- sprawling lawn, red and white tower, big trains inside, all on a commercial strip with McDonald's handy. But the real museum is hidden.
Yes, you can tour through the main building anytime. But close to 98 per cent of what the museum owns, the full collection of Canada's scientific and technological history, is in warehouses.
It's called the Reserve Collection, and there's nowhere else to put it.
This bugs the boss, Claude Faubert.
"I used to think about five per cent (of the overall collection) was on display," he says. But a closer look shows it's much worse than that: Less than two per cent of the full collection, from early X-ray machines to a Popemobile, is in public view.
"And that's a shame," says Mr. Faubert, the museum's director-general. "We've got everything in there: Dentists' chairs, fire trucks, little computers, cars. If you could just walk through there."
Maybe, in fact, that's a solution. The current warehouses can't be turned into public buildings. But if the museum played its cards right, he thinks that 10 to 15 per cent of the collection could be viewed -- if a new site could open up storage space for public viewing.
That's been the big "if" in the museum story since it opened on Nov. 15, 1967.
This Saturday, the museum will celebrate its 40th birthday, and it is still searching for a new home.
The cramped building you know today used to be the warehouse for the Morrison Lamothe bakery. It was a temporary solution in 1967, and still is, on paper.
It had about 118,000 square feet of floor space and 12 hectares of land, and one more attribute: It was available for a 1967 opening.
The first visitors found 16 main displays, with a heavy dose of transportation. Seven steam locomotives. Five aircraft and a number of carriages, automobiles and railway cars. Then came aircraft engines, plows, harvesting equipment, an Amoskeag fire engine reputed to have been used during the Great Fire of 1900 in Hull and smaller displays on meteorology, atomic energy, surveying, communications, and astronomy.
In Canada's Centennial year, this meant a lot. It was a Centennial demonstration of Canadian culture and history.
Great timing. But not such a great building, says Del Muise, a history professor at Carleton University with particular expertise in museums. (He used to work for what is now the Canadian Museum of Nature).
"They need a purpose-built building," he said.
"It would give them a broader range to do the kind of programming and interpretive work than they can do on those bare concrete floors.
"These guys for the last 30 years have been looking for a better building. They've been retrofitting that building over and over again so that it's beyond its capacity to support what it's doing."
What's wrong with an old bakery warehouse?
"The staff is spread all over the place. The collections are in a variety of different buildings," Mr. Muise says.
"The big highlight is that they've got big stuff. Everybody likes to go and see the railway engines and various other things. But when it gets down to their detailed programming, whether it's printing or the canoe exhibit or other things, they're squished into tiny little spaces and there's very little opportunity to do anything with that.
"They've been doing their best with what they have, and a lot better than we have the right to expect them to do, I think."
The stuff out back in warehouses is spectacular, and the odd visitor (supervised) gets to see airplane wings from the first days of flight in Canada, a railway car that carried King George VI and Queen Elizabeth across Canada ("Sometimes the story of where a thing came from is more interesting than the item itself," Mr. Faubert says) and Ski-Doo No. 1,000,001, in its original crate.
Also parts, from compressors to hex bolts, piled to the ceilings. "It's all about the shelving," he notes.
A site search is under way now, he says. A lot of the planning went on in 2002 and 2003, and the museum has narrowed its wishlist to three sites: One on the western section of LeBreton Flats, one in Jacques Cartier Park in Gatineau, and one just south of the Canada Aviation Museum.
He won't be pinned down on what a new building would look like; that depends on the site, and the budget. It would have to be bigger than they have now, though, and able to put on bigger displays.
The problem remains money. In January, then-Treasury Board president John Baird said the country can't afford $400 million for a new science and tech museum. (That figure, he said, was half the original proposal.) He promised that the Conservatives would reassess the situation. It's a road the museum has been down before.
Museums are expensive, Mr. Muise notes, and politically, he believes this project "is nowhere.
"They're way way down on anybody's political agenda at the moment -- beyond museums that are going to look at human rights or beyond even what they now call the National Portrait Gallery of Canada," he said.
"What you need is a political will," and this would require "multi-multi-million-dollar" spending that no party feels is very urgent.
In the meantime, there's a "modest" birthday party coming: Cake and balloons during regular hours Saturday (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and a bring-your-own-artifact event on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The museum will have experts ready to tell you all you wanted to know about Aunt Mathilde's funny old kitchen gadgets, or perhaps the 1950s equipment salvaged from an early TV station.
What there won't be is a stunning announcement about a new building.
"It's a bakery, it's a bakery, it's a bakery," Carleton's Mr. Muise says, "and no matter how much you retrofit it, it's going to be problematic, I think."
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