When Raymond Moriyama (1929 – 2023) designed the Ontario Science Centre (1969), he took on the architectural mandate to ‘connect with nature’ to another level. Building on a challenging patch of green, 12km from Toronto’s downtown core, the Vancouver-born, Toronto-based architect broke down the building into three parts and made it a slave to its site: part one sits on the public road; a bridge leads to part two; and an escalator down a valley to part three.
As an added challenge, he made it out of concrete but so apposite it seems as if it grew from a scattering of seeds. But don’t call it brutalist architecture, says architect Brian Rudy, who worked closely with Moriyama on the 2005 Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
