A fridge, a stove, marbled tiled floors–everything in this kitchen looks perfectly normal, except upon entrance, the senses just can’t seem to agree. Vertigo strikes.
Visitors will once again be able to experience spatial distortion in the Crazy Kitchen at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology as it reopens in November. The reopening coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary.
The museum was temporarily closed for renovation in 2014 as the physical building had “outlived its usefulness,” said Christina Tessier, the Museum Director. However, Tessier said they’ve “turned what was certainly unhappy times in terms of the closure into an opportunity to revamp the museum,” with the aid of an $80.5 million grant. Prior to closing, the museum saw roughly 300,000 visitors annually.
Although the building is being reconstructed, the central tenet of the museum remains the same. The museum has “the vision of being a highly interactive space to inspire kids with science and technology and innovation,” said Tessier, “that hasn’t changed for us.”
The Canada Science and and Technology Museum was first built in 1967 as a centennial project. According to the 1951 Massey Commission, the science museum “would serve not only to record Canadian achievements in science and technology but as a valuable guide and as a reference for future developments.”
Documentation written by museum historian Sharon Babaian revealed that the museum had a hasty start. The museum’s first director, David Baird, only had ten months to transform an old bakery into the new museum. The museum had to be a “make-do operation”, as Baird did not have the time to represent all of Canada’s important scientific and technological contributions.
However, Baird succeeded in creating the first interactive museum in Canada. Museums at the time were largely built on research and collection, but the Canada Science and Technology Museum introduced an element of visitor interactivity that was later widely adopted. “The idea behind this museum was that it wouldn’t be like the old museums,” said Babaian, “they actually in a way copied what we were doing.”
The Canada Science and Technology Museum was also the first to popularize Canada Day. “In the sixties and seventies Canada day was not a big deal” said Babaian. For Canada Day, or Dominion Day as it was previously called, the museum would hold additional public demonstrations that included driving vehicles from the collection, operating historical machinery such as a printing press, woodworking, and a broom-making apparatus. “It was all hands on deck,” said Babaian.
At the initial opening in 1967 the museum featured exhibits on aviation, vehicular transportation, agriculture, weather, and space. The museum’s most popular locomotives display and Crazy Kitchen have been present since the museum’s start, and Tessier intends on keeping these for the museum’s reopening.
New galleries will include Artifact Alley, Creating and Using Knowledge, Children’s Gallery, Moving and Connecting, Technology in Our Lives, and Transforming Resources. Visitors can look forward to 7,400 m2 of new exhibition space, including 850 m2 dedicated to travelling exhibitions from around the world.
Tessier is most looking forward to the demonstration stage which will be at the heart of the new museum. “We’ll have fire tornadoes and small explosions, and all kinds of great stuff,” she said, “but it’s also a space where we can talk about the present and the future of science and technology and innovation in Canada.”
For the museum’s future, Tessier said she is “looking at building up all of our educational and public programming so that we can engage more and more students and youth.” Tessier is also looking to engage audiences from across Canada through traveling exhibitions, outreach programming, and developing mobile apps.
“The museum is a window to science and technology and innovation in Canada,” said Tessier, “I miss being able to walk out on the floor and watch families and kids interacting with the exhibitions and seeing those ‘Aha!’ moments on a kid’s face when they learn something new.”
*Photos courtesy of the Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation.
The documentation that I’ve used are photos acquired from museum historian Sharon Babaian. They illustrate what the museum looked like in its early days. I also used the Building a National Museum of Science and Technology file written by Babaian for information on the museum’s opening. The file can be found on the museum’s website. Pictures of the new museum were acquired from a press release from November. They give the reader a visualization of what to look forward to when the museum reopens.