Nestled between the Royal Ontario Museum and Falconer Hall, the Toronto McLaughlin Planetarium is awaiting its demolition sentence. This unique building with a spherical roof opened its door to the public in 1968 with what was once state-of-the-art equipments to educate people about space. Now it serves as a temporary office space and a storage facility. It's very unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be any effort put into preserving and effectively using such a unique and important building. The McLaughlin Planetarium is apparently one of only ten planetarium in Canada. With all the available technologies and interests for arts and science in the city, it's difficult to understand why no one has found a way to put it to better use, specially considering the fact that it's in a prime location where other museums are within walking distance.
As a way to essentially preserve part of the history of the city, I organized a sketching session with members of the Toronto Urban Sketchers group this weekend to capture the building before it is gone for good. The sketches from this building as well as other disappearing landmarks, will be part of an illustrated book we're currently working on. You can see more sketches from our session here.
I learned a little while ago, especially when working as an interior designer, that no plans, as thorough and detailed as they can be, will completely prepare you for dealing with any situation. They help but you will still have to improvise. So you have to learn to roll with the punches, adapt and take action. Taking action very often is the difficult part, the part when a lot of us freeze and feel stuck. Some are fortunate enough to figure out a way around it and some give up and resign themselves to their unfortunate situation. When people endure unpleasant situations in a defeatist type of way, where they resign themselves to complain about their situation as opposed to doing something about it, it’s what many call “learned helplessness”. I had never heard of that term before this year and it fascinated me. Of course it caused me to look inward and look for situations where I might have displayed that behaviour, accepting what I don’t want and resigning myself to thinking that “it’s just the way things are”, not even trying to do something about it. And now every so often, I take the time to take a step back, look at my situation and see where I’m displaying that kind of behaviour and make adjustments. It’s a challenging task as it’s impossible to be completely objective about it but it’s doable.