Ontario Science Centre - History

History

Planning for the centre started in 1961 during Toronto's massive expansion of the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama was hired to design the site. The design, consisting of three main buildings connected by a series of bridges and escalators, follows the natural contours of the Don River ravine, into which the Centre descends. Construction started in 1966 with plans to make it a part of the city's 1967 Canadian Centennial celebrations. It was officially named the Centennial Centre of Science and Technology. However construction was not complete in 1967, and the Science Centre did not open to the public until two years later, on September 26, 1969.

At the time, the Science Centre was a pioneer for its hands on approach to science, which was later duplicated in San Francisco's Exploratorium and Detroit's Museum of Science and Technology. Unlike a traditional museum, where the exhibits are for display only, the majority of the exhibits at the Science Centre were interactive, while many others were live demonstrations (metalworking for example). The Communications room contained a number of computerized displays, including a very popular tic-tac-toe game run on a PDP-11.

The centre was very popular during the 1970s, but by the mid- to late 1980s, visiting rates had dropped considerably. Most of the displays were the originals, and had become either outdated, or worn out. During the 1990s, these issues were addressed by opening the Science Centre to corporate funding. In 1996, the province's first OMNIMAX theatre opened in an expanded entrance area and additional changes soon followed. The most recent of these changes is the $40 million Agents of Change project, the final phase of which opened in June 2006.