Museum faces space crunch: report
Storage could run short by 2024 after costs soar, building downsized
The new $156-million building that’s meant to store artifacts at the Canada Science and Technology Museum has been scaled down and could run short on space five years after it opens, according to a government report.
The Collections and Conservation Centre, a storage building that’s being constructed next door to the main museum on St. Laurent Boulevard, will be smaller and less sophisticated than originally planned, largely because costs exceeded estimates, the documents say.
The main, rebuilt, $80-million building opened in November, and the collections building will open in 2019. It was intended to store more than 90 per cent of the museum’s collection, from tiny instruments to streetcars and electrical generating equipment, which is currently in a private, rented building. It is also supposed to provide storage for the National Gallery, and offer laboratories for the Canadian Conservation Institute.
Now a report by Treasury Board says it will be unable to do its full job. This newspaper got a copy through access to information. The report uses the official name for the museum, which is National Museum of Science and Technology:
“The NGC’s and NMST’s longterm artefact storage needs will not be met. It is expected that the NMST may start running out of space in 2024,” Treasury Board says.
The Canadian Conservation Institute will be allotted some space, “but the more specialized laboratories it specifically needs will not be built.” The CCI is part of the Canadian Heritage department of the federal government.
The labs were cancelled because costs were underestimated, the documents indicate. The planners counted on spending $47.5 million on labs, mechanical and electrical equipment.
The real cost turned out to be $119 million, so the labs will not be built, for now at least.
“The fourth floor of the building, slated to house these specialized laboratories, will remain empty or be used temporarily to meet NMST’s storage needs, until additional funding can be found to cover the costs of fitting up the laboratories,” the report says.
Then there were engineering problems.
The collections building, as approved, was designed to “wrap around” part of the main museum.
But that didn’t work. One problem was that it would have covered up most of the parking spaces along the side and rear of the museum. Another issue was that some emergency exits from the main museum would have led into a construction zone, a situation that would have been considered a safety hazard. That meant they would have had to be sealed shut during construction. And since the museum must have working fire exits, the only option would have been to carve out new exits elsewhere in the museum.
The museum chose instead to move the whole collections building farther away and abandon the wraparound design.
But it found it could no longer afford to build a structure of 51,000 square metres, as planned. Instead it is building 35,800 square metres, or what the Treasury Board calls “a much reduced footprint.”
The museum’s board approved the change in March 2017, choosing to stay within its budget. Since then, top management has led repeated media tours of the main museum, showing off the construction and then the finished product — without mentioning the changes to their bigger and more expensive construction project next door.
The changes did not impress Ian Lee, who teaches management at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business.
“It’s poor planning,” he said. “Buildings are long-lived assets. They are not like cars or trucks.
“Building a brand-new storage building that is not going to solve your storage problem within roughly five years of its completion seems to me to be short-sighted on the planning. The purpose of storage is a long-term issue for a museum.
“This does not seem that strategic because it does not solve their long-term storage problem. It will come back and hit them again within a relatively very, very short period of time.”
It’s not unreasonable for the first cost estimate to be far below the final cost, he said. That happens often.
“On the other hand, that should have been built into the budgeting from the get-go. You should have a 25 per cent cost overrun contingency, or 35 per cent or something. Because there are unanticipated things that happen.”
To build a smaller and less functional structure in order to stay in budget “is not strategic. … They should have said, ‘Look, we’ve got to build it right. We’ve got to do it right. This is a long-term asset so now we’ve got to go back to the Treasury Board with a revised plan.’ ”
A request for comment to the museum was not returned Monday.