For imagination’s sake, save the Science and Tech Museum
Emma Godmere, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: September 15, 2014, Last Updated: September 15, 2014 4:11 PM EDT
I stood in awe. I’d never before seen anything so large in such a small space. I craned my neck so far I bent backward, sizing up the gigantic steam locomotives that towered just past the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s entrance; they made the surrounding exhibits look like rooms in a dollhouse. Awe turned to anxiety as my imagination ran wild: could these trains spring to life, bowling over my seven-year-old frame, bursting through the museum’s walls, speeding toward St. Laurent Boulevard?
My father saw my face turning white and whisked me away to the radio and television exhibits; my unexpected introduction to the science of the world in which I immerse myself daily. My imagination ran a much less frightened course as I learned how voices and images are transmitted through the air. A new kind of awe rooted me to the spot. I daydreamed about working in media someday. Even standing among the trains, I was spellbound. I didn’t want to leave.
To anyone else, I was just another suburban Ottawa kid ambling around a museum on a quiet, admission-free evening. But what no one else could see was that I — along with hundreds, even thousands of unsuspecting students before and after me — was discovering a whole new dimension, one that computer screens and elementary school science classes could never quite reach.
Last week’s story that detailed the indefinite closure of the Science and Technology Museum due to mould contamination was hard to believe. Not because anyone thought that building could last forever — incredibly, its current location, an old bakery, was only meant to be a temporary home for the museum when it opened in 1967 — but because this better-than-a-classroom laboratory of learning has been cast aside for so long, left to cope with a crumbling building and no concrete plans for a brighter future. The museum is so despondent, and so desperate to hold on to what little infrastructure it currently has, that it effectively trashed its plans to seek out a new home and instead spend its limited funds on urgent building maintenance.
Meanwhile, the newly rebranded Canadian Museum of History enjoyed a $25-million investment from the federal government in 2012; the Canadian Museum of Nature concluded a spectacular renewal project in 2010, one that took six years and $216 million to accomplish; and the Canadian War Museum moved into its stately LeBreton Flats home in 2005, at a final cost of about $135 million. Of course, each was not without its issues: public criticism, government concerns and hefty price tags were only a few among many obstacles that set these projects back on several occasions. But now they stand before us, gleaming and new, ready to enjoy and explore, while its forgotten sibling remains stranded in a space unfit for use.
There is some hope: the National Capital Commission may soon be considering plans for new developments on LeBreton Flats, one of the oft-cited potential locations for a new Science and Technology Museum. And the Ottawa-area federal minister in charge of the NCC, John Baird, recently stated his support for a new museum — though he still quickly noted that, “obviously it’s a question of money.”
That pure, independent, curiosity-driven discovery that the Science and Technology Museum provides for a kid — especially a modern-day, Internet-burdened kid — is priceless. I was lucky that those trains never actually sprang to life. But my imagination did, in a way that it never quite has again in the time since I last walked through those derelict doors.
Emma Godmere is a writer, radio producer and host living in Toronto.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...nd-tech-museum
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