Ontario Science Centre to close immediately due to risk of roof collapse | Hacker News Reader

Ontario Science Centre to close immediately due to risk of roof collapse

cbc.ca

64 pointsamichail34 comments

> claim the roof of the science centre is at risk of collapsing.. the same year that he is proposing to move the science centre to Ontario Place.. "to support a private foreign spa company".. allows public infrastructure to fall apart in order to advance private interests.. "Closing a world-class science and cultural institution is heartbreaking".. "The [province] could have invested in revitalizing the Science Centre, but instead it's using our public money to concoct a sham business case against this important community hub"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Science_Centre

  When it first opened [in 1969], the Science Centre was a pioneer for its hands-on approach to science, along with San Francisco's Exploratorium and the Michigan Science Center in Detroit. Unlike a traditional museum, where exhibits are for viewing only, the majority of the exhibits at the Science Centre were interactive, while many others were live demonstrations (e.g. metalworking). The Communications room contained a number of computerized displays, including a very popular tic-tac-toe game, run on a PDP-11 minicomputer. By 1974, it hosted about 250,000 students on field trips annually.

Over 50 years, the Ontario Science Centre has introduced hundreds of thousands of students to scientific principles via interactive exhibits. It will now be replaced by a commercial theme park in a tourism venue, rather than serving local students via the new Science Center subway station.

  The Ontario Science Centre Science School (OSCSS) offers grade 12 University Preparation courses in STEM subjects.. [and] an interdisciplinary studies credit in science communication.. the program.. is available at no cost to students from anywhere in Ontario. While at the Science Centre, students earn practicum hours through volunteering and interacting with visitors..

  Ontario Science Centre was used by David Cronenberg as a location for his 1970 film Crimes of the Future.

Does Canada not have a tech lobby that can outbid construction boondogglers, to defend the next generation of tech talent? Alternately, the US tech lobby could defend the Ontario Science Centre, as part of a talent supply chain that leads to U of Waterloo and subsequent engineering labor pipeline to US tech companies. If the Ontario Science Center and future labor pool must be sacrificed, can they at least fetch a higher price at the altar of special interests?

Was one of those 250,000 kids. The only real vivid memory I have left of that unfortunately was seeing a Tour de France documentary in the IMAX screen they have. That was really incredible.

Haven't really followed the story closely, but quite sad to see it getting (forcefully?) shutdown like this.

And it’s a real IMAX dome screen, not the diluted version that gets the stamp these days.

I’m just glad I got to take my kids to the museum and watch a movie on the dome last year before it closed.

It wasn’t the full experience of the OSC that we had as kids. The walk across the bridge (also closed over structural concerns) and the gradual descent over the course of your visit into the Don Valley subconsciously tied science with the natural world.

The last half-decade, it was a shell of what it was.

I agree with you, taking the bus down to the bottom was pretty lame.

I was part of OSCSS. I come from rural Ontario and this was the first time I was really exposed to other people with the hacker ethos. Tried to bootstrap a company with a friend met at the school but two 18 year olds trying to partner with enterprises went as well as you would expect. Did not know YC was a thing until a couple of years later.

The original vision, via https://savesciencecentre.com

  “The centre must be a place for everyone – not cater to 12 specialists and ignore 12,000 others. It must initially give a sense of self-possession, It must arouse curiosity. It must lead to understanding , not just knowledge. It must be a place of wonder. It must give immeasurable qualities of comfort and joy and discovery with others. It must inspire the visitor with ideas through active participation. It must be an emotional experience, with intellectual satisfaction and it must be fun”.

  Since 1969:

  52 million visitors
  9 million students
  With the [SF] Exploratorium.. inspired a global science museum movement with over 3,000 science centres

  Annually:

  900,000 visitors
  170,000 students through school field trips

Dec. 2023 response to business case for relocation: https://savesciencecentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/res...

The great blue whale bones that hung from the ceiling was found beached in the maritimes, transported to Maple, and buried behind my dad's OFRI lab in an attempt to decompose the flesh and extract the bones (eventual success!). Our family dog dug it up, chewed it, rolled in it, contracted worms from it, and died. My family will forever be attached to this structure.

Update: I shared this link with my family and my story is being latently corrected. The whale was a fin wale. There are other corrections as well, but they diminish the tale. I prefer my childhood understanding to my corrected adult understanding. I'll leave you with the better story.

The Science Centre is actually a collection of different buildings, I highly doubt that all these are structurally unsound now prompting the closure of the entire centre. It's highly convenient for this to happen now when the Premiere of the province has been advocating selling off the valuable land to his developer buddies.

I know nothing about architecture/construction, but how much of these timelines and costs are due to the massively inefficient construction costs in Anglophone countries? Like, does it really take double digit millions and >2 years to fix some roof panels, when we can repair bridges in a fraction of that time? How much of this is going to be permitting, excess proceduralism and "environmental assessment" crap and how much of it is our current technological limitations?

There is/was also rampant corruption ran by real mafia. Some of them are from Montreal and are on the run in Sicily. Not sure if this spread to Ontario but given the timelines I imagine it had.

See Turcot collapse in Montreal.

See Olympic building in Montreal.

It's just a stadium roof, what could it cost, $870M?

But seriously, the city has had issues finding contractors for basic services because they'd all been banned for ties with organized crime. It's absolutely mad. Then there's what's happening at the port with all the stolen cars...

The hilarity is the ongoing multi-decade saga about what should be done with the roof now: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8BrUmBjDPzQ

> Like, does it really take double digit millions and >2 years to fix some roof panels

If it’s made from concrete, absolutely. Virtually every commercial building has a flat metal roof with epdm over it because it’s substantially easier to replace it every 20 years. You start on one end, cut out sections, install new roof decking and then install the membrane over it. Repeat until you’ve completed the roof.

For this specific building, everything on top of or attached to the roof needs to be removed and reinstalled. Probably everything inside the building that would be exposed to the elements when the roof is removed would need to be removed and replaced. You need heavy cranes to lift the precast concrete panels into place. If they can’t use the lightweight concrete they used in the 60s, it’s possible the foundations/footings aren’t strong enough to support a new concrete roof which would require structural reinforcements. For trades you’ll have general laborers, heavy equipment operators, steelworkers, mechanical and electrical, concrete.

Double digit millions and two years to replace a concrete roof on a huge building is not outlandish if you understand what construction labor and heavy equipment costs.

Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about reinforced aerated autoclaved concrete, Ontario has had 30 years to secure funding for this roof and decided not to:

> RAAC has been shown to have limited structural reinforcement bar (rebar) integrity in 40 to 50 year-old RAAC roof panels, which began to be observed in the 1990s

> If they can’t use the lightweight concrete they used in the 60s…

Was there something about lightweight concrete from the 1960s that would preclude its use today? Asbestos fibres?

This building has a reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete roof.

> RAAC has been shown to have limited structural reinforcement bar (rebar) integrity in 40 to 50 year-old RAAC roof panels, which began to be observed in the 1990s.[22][23][24][25][26] The material is liable to fail without visible deterioration or warning.[22][26] The material is not the root cause, rather inadequate roof maintenance, which permits water infiltration, and decisions by building owners as to repair or the replacement of existing roofs, which is a part of cost-benefit analysis.[27]

> Professional engineering concern was publicly raised in the United Kingdom in 1995 about the structural performance of RAAC following inspections of cracked units in British school roofs,[28] with it being observed that it was likely that RAAC in other countries may exhibit problems similar to those found in the United Kingdom.[18]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclaved_aerated_concrete

More info about RAAC, specifically from the 1950s-1970s

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2023/march/reinforc...

Thanks for the detailed! RAAC didn’t parse as a concrete type on first read of your higher comment, but it’s now tied all together. :)

Weird - this is the first place I saw the "internet" on display as a kid. Shame to see it close in such an unceremonious way.

this is probably more due to cronyism by the Ford government than anything. I highly doubt they just discovered this problem.

Chronically underfunding and neglecting things on purpose to turn around and sell/privatize them after they've failed is a trope at this point.

Their logo looks like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red,_green_and_blue,... with missing colors.

Apparently it is an intentional riff on that kindof of color-mixing scientific diagram to create the shape of a trillium (the flower of Ontario). Though ironically it's no longer scientifically accurate as a result.

Sad to see the apparent decline it's been in for a long time but glad I got to enjoy it and Ontario Place in their prime years. I haven't been back to Toronto since the late 80s but from time to time look up many of the tourist sites we visited in the 70s and 80s. Too bad, for whatever reasons, they didn't keep up with the times.

If anyone else went in the 80s and remembers the fire-fighting computer game and knows somewhere it can be played now, I'd love to hear about it. The graphics were quite primitive but it gave a really good basic understanding of wildland fire fighting.

It's been well over 30 years since I've been there but I always enjoyed going there in the summer, along with the ROM and Planetarium. I'm actually pretty sad to hear this.

As someone who recently took their nephews to the Science Centre, not visiting since high school roughly 25 years ago, it was pretty decrepit and rundown. Regardless of the politics surrounding all this, it’s in desperate need of a rejuvenating both in terms of infrastructure as well as exhibits.

PS not worth the admission, if you want to take the kids on an educational adventure go to Ripley's Aquarium.

Gates are being put up while there are still kids inside [0].

[0] https://x.com/SaveOSC/status/1804193939903152613

I had the good fortune in being able to attend a couple of corporate receptions as a kid, where I had free roam over some of the exhibit halls in after-hours. It was incredible.

I always thought the science centre was connected to the ROM... I didn't know they moved.

I’ve been following the Science-Centre-changing-locations-to-Harbourfront story for quite a while and Never heard (from anyone who told me the story) about the roof as being a reason for the move, so I wonder how recent the roof issue is. I’d prefer the Science Centre close immediately on a temporary basis to better evaluate the possibility of repairing the roof rather than using it as an excuse to move the Centre to the Harbourfornt, which is what the Premier wants, broken roof or not.

While science is important and someone has to do it, I don't think it is as intellectually rewarding as hobby/indie computer programming.

Maybe trying to get students interested in science instead of computer programming is problematic for this reason?

Learning about science is more rewarding to me as an amateur than hobby/indie computer programming. There are others like me, though perhaps a minority on this site. I'm sad to see this go. One of my favorite experiences as a child was visiting the Boston Science Museum.

Why view it as a dichotomy? Expose kids to both (and other fruitful intellectual hobbies) and let them pick the ones they like. I don't think it's "problematic" to consider that how rewarding a hobby feels might not be an objective hierarchy and instead might vary by individual.

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