The story of the revolutionary Ontario Science Centre, its iconic exhibits, and the people who made it all happen.
A Centennial project announced by Premier John Robarts in 1964, the Ontario Science Centre upended the traditional museum instruction - Don't Touch - and created a whole new category of visitor attraction. Its designers, scientists, and craftspeople developed a way to explain science to the public by building mechanical devices for visitors to touch. Exhibits like the bicycle generator, and iconic demonstrations like the electricity show that made your hair stand on end, even those long escalators in that landmark building beside a Toronto ravine inspired generations of young people to pursue careers in science.
The Ontario Science Centre also changed the way that traditional museums and art galleries now interpret their collections to the public, and helped create an industry around this thing called interactivity. Its legacy is the contribution that it made to the public understanding of science. That work is even more remarkable when you consider that it was created inside a government institution, under a cloud of senior managers of varying competencies, and politicians with changing agendas who closed its doors in the summer of 2024.
Table of Contents:
- Please Touch Everything
- The 60 Years of the Ontario Science Centre
- One. In the Beginning (1964-1969)
- A Gift to the People
- The First Employees
- The First Reorganization
- The First Scientists
- They Develop Interactive Exhibits
- For the Building in the Park
- Two. The Opening in September
- This is Going to Be a Fun Place
- A Different Approach
- Other Centennial Projects
- Three. What Happened Next (1969 – 1974)
- Running an Institution
- The White Lab Coats
- Taking Science on the Road
- Four. The Tuzo Years (1974 – 1985)
- In Praise of Hands
- A New Ministry
- The First Cut in Funding
- Changing Retail Narratives
- Exhibits in a Recession
- The China Show
- Chafing With Restrictions
- The Thing About 1984
- Five. Years of Turmoil & Change (1985-2000)
- Planning and Hiring
- The Disruption
- An Uneasy Calm
- More Changes
- Six. Under One Leader (2000 – 2014)
- Shows That Travelled
- The New Direction
- Engaging With Communities
- Those Blockbuster Shows
- Selling to the World
- Seven. The Later Years (2014 – 2022)
- A Government Man
- A Profession and Its Organizations
- A Triumph for Science
- Eight. In The End (2023-2024)
- The Idea of a Move
- The Community Fights Back
- The Final Blow
- Packing Up and Leaving
- And So
- Appendix: What a Visitor Saw
- Acknowledgements
About the Author :
Joan Francuz is a business and technical writer who worked for decades in the tech industry and at the Ontario Science Centre in the early 1990s. She lives in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.
Review :
The Ontario Science Centre has been a vital hub for the Flemingdon and Thorncliffe Park communities for over fifty years. Please Touch Everything illustrates exactly why the Ford government’s decision to remove this landmark was such a profound loss for our city. This book is a timely and necessary celebration of a world-class institution that we are working tirelessly to restore to its rightful home.
This book exposes an uncomfortable truth: Our most imaginative public institutions are often dismantled not because they failed, but because we failed to value them. The Ontario Science Centre — like Ontario Place — was a rare civic achievement. Joan Francuz makes clear how casually such achievements are undone, and how costly that loss truly is.
In her extensively researched book, Joan Francuz has revealed the creation of the Ontario Science Centre’s important breakthrough in letting people experience science and technology in a new type of museum. The story continues up to the terrible closing of the science centre on Don Mills Road and the attempts to move it to Ontario Place on Toronto’s waterfront.
A love letter to science education, to Canadian ambition, and to the idea that curiosity is one of our most powerful national resources.
A fascinating study about the creation, the development, and ultimately the unfortunate closing of one of the pioneering cultural institutions that helped shape and stimulate the growth of the science centre movement of the late twentieth century. Joan Francuz succeeds wonderfully in portraying the inside story through the words of the talented staff of designers that brought this remarkable institution to life for the enjoyment of millions of visitors over the years.
Joan Francuz has given us a loving portrait of the Ontario Science Centre and of the people whose creativity and dedication have provided joy and inspiration to generations. Accessible but comprehensive, this book takes us behind the scenes to see for ourselves how the science centre set a standard for education and engagement, changing the way people learn about their world.
A must-read for anyone interested in architecture and the fractured intersectionality between government and public spaces. This work details the story of a Canadian Brutalist masterpiece now relegated to the distant memories of a screen-bound generation. It not only documents the Ontario Science Centre’s rich history and sad demise but like the centre itself, it also entertains while educating.
A riveting chronicle of an institution beloved to generations of Ontarians. Francuz carefully documents the rise and fall of the iconic Ontario Science Centre, from its opening as a futuristic centennial project, to the shocking closure of its landmark building in 2024. Her extensive interviews with former Ontario Science Centre staff, designers, hosts, and advocates constitute a detailed, valuable account of how design-oriented thinking can help an innovation-oriented institution thrive — and how undervaluing that intellectual capital can ultimately destroy it.
Please Touch Everything captures the bold spirit that changed how the world experiences science. The Ontario Science Centre showed us that science is something you do, not just observe, inspiring institutions like Science North to put curiosity first.
With this book, Joan Francuz tells the story of the Ontario Science Centre’s evolution and the designers, craftspeople, hosts, and educators who created the vision and brought it to life for millions of visitors. This is a story of Canadian innovation, of passion, of inspiration and engagement.
From the Ontario Science Centre’s inception as an audacious national centennial project, the team at the helm charted a new course for interactive, hands-on, engaging visitor experience unlike anything that had been done before.… Joan Francuz has written an engaging biography of an incredible character in the landscape of cultural institutions in Ontario and clearly articulates the many lessons to be learned.
Joan Francuz has crafted an intriguing examination of the “life and times” of the Ontario Science Centre. Through extensive research and a great deal of inside information, she has illuminated the figures and forces that gave shape and spirit to this treasured attraction, and has skillfully set the stages of development in the context of the wider society to which the Centre was contributing. This is a delightful read for both those with memories of the Ontario Science Centre and those fascinated by the evolution of a cultural institution within the government orbit.
