LOTS TO DO, SEE AND TOUCH
$80M later, museum set to reopen
Something old, something new, even some things that are borrowed. That’s the rebuilt, $80-million Canada Science and Technology Museum for you.
It looks different from way across the parking lot and the lawn beyond — a colourful glow of moving pictures that surround the entrance, telling visitors to buckle up for a new experience.
And yet it will feel familiar, in places, when it reopens to the public on Friday. Given three years to re-make everything from the ground up after demolishing the decrepit old building, management struck a balance between preserving the old and striking out in new directions.
The Crazy Kitchen and locomotive are back, with some tweaks but very familiar. But the main attraction in terms of old things is Artifact Alley, the long corridor running diagonally across the entire building. It now shows more than 700 historical artifacts of all kinds — bicycles and an amphibious car and a fishing dory and telescopes and woodworking tools, on and on.
Crucially, that is double the number of artifacts that were on display in the old museum. One criticism of the old building was exactly that: It kept too much good stuffed locked away in storage buildings out back. No more.
“It almost feels like a cabinet of curiosities but modernized, more interactive,” said Christina Tessier, the museum’s director general. She calls the artifacts “the wealth of the museum.”
She notes that even where there are familiar exhibits the new displays have more to say about them.
“Technology does not exist in a vacuum,” she said, blithely ignoring some space-related items nearby. “The cultural component is incredibly important. We build technology so that humans can use it.”
Those locomotives, for instance, are now part of a larger exhibit on steam power, and what it meant to immigrants crossing the ocean on steamships and often carrying on to Western Canada by train.
There’s also a working steam engine from a Canadian Coast Guard ship. What’s completely new? “A better visitor experience, so (things that) people can see and touch and do. There are so many more interactive areas,” Tessier said.
There are 11 new exhibits, and also space for travelling exhibits that was not available in the old incarnation. One borrowed goody on site now is a telescope built in Italy in the 1600s, as big as a good-sized boa constrictor (though straighter). Sadly, it’s not interactive. Too delicate.
One new exhibit is Zooom, a large room meant for children aged eight and under, where they can play with a variety of exhibits using variations on balls, circles and wheels.
Another is a “tiny house,” for people who want to experience what living in 300 square feet is like.
An exhibit called Into the Great Outdoors examines the history of transportation technologies and outdoor recreation in Canada. There’s a medical technology exhibit, another on our experience of sound, and one on natural resources.
But let’s get back to the entrance, because that is where filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq has laboured to produce a three-minute looping video on a surface of LED lights that rises straight up the left side over the doors, then crosses above the doors and angles down to ground level on the right. A Cineplex screen it’s not, and he had to enlist some youngsters with mathematical minds to help him plan it.
But the result is striking, even a long way off.
“The challenge … was to create something that can be read at different distances,” Baylaucq said. “The first thing we did was to go to the other end of the park and say: For people who don’t know about the museum, what do they see?”
The viewer starts being able to see the general picture from far off, but gets more and more detail while approaching the building.
It’s a three-minute journey through science, relying heavily on images from nature. As Baylaucq says, that is where much of our scientific knowledge begins. And he relies heavily on one colour at a time: blue ocean shot underwater, then green forest, orange autumn leaves, golden grain, and bright flames.
From 5 to 11 p.m. each night a second phase of the film will be projected on the flat wall facing St. Laurent Boulevard. Curious people have been driving into the parking lot in the evenings as preparations went on.
And there is one more show in the works: The new building that will some day house the collections, with a twist. The current storage barns out back are not open to the public. The massive new building will be partly open, with regular guided tours that will show off objects too big or too delicate to put in the main exhibits.
The museum opens to the public Friday at 9 a.m.
The gift shop, incidentally, is open.