Quote:
Originally Posted by Muta
I agree with you here Table, we do need a brand new contemporary art gallery facility in the city (along with modernization of almost all of our outdated museum facilities save the Military Museums)... but the Science Centre is no slouch of a facility for art. I worked there part time for over eight years when I was younger, and with some interior modifications and renovations, I am dead sure it can have high quality gallery space and can be a social gathering hub. It's not ideal (compared to having a new facility), but having a historic, architectural-award-winning building is a pretty nice consolation prize (and at very little to no cost)!
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I think it works fine as a place-holder and as a small-scale gallery, but long-term it just doesn't seem to have enough of those big open spaces that a modern gallery needs to hold the really cool large-scale stuff. I guess you could always do a massive renovation, but it doesn't feel like a building you could work with without #######izing the original to the point of irrelevance. In a perfect world, I'd actually love to see the Mewata Armoury retrofitted into a gallery....with some modern additions, it could become a mini Tate Modern. A redone CBE building would be cool too (not unlike that proposal that was floating around).
Short-term, the Science Centre plan is better than nothing I guess...but it just comes across as very unambitious to me. The lack of quality museums and cultural institutions is in my opinion the biggest hole in this city right now, and Id like to see us thing big on this one, as it's one of those "once in a generation or two" type of projects that don't come around often. Not unlike the Central Library.
Anyway, go local hockey team.