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“We’re more than halfway through the design process,” says Trish Kuffler, the city’s program manager for facility design and construction.

The city plans to put the construction contract out to tender in the first quarter of 2017. The hope is to start construction this spring and for the Telus World of Science to take possession in time for the 2018 summer camp season.

The project will have a budget of about $6.6 million.

It’s a sensible plan for one of Edmonton’s most quirky and beautiful works of public architecture, and for Canada’s first public planetarium.

The dramatic round glass and gold building, with its signature silver-domed roof and transparent glass walls, was designed by the official City of Edmonton architects, R.F. Duke and W. Tefler, to look like a flying saucer hovering above the ground on a raised pedestal.

Photo by Fish Griwkowsky / Postmedia

Outside, the building was finished with fieldstone and gold anodized aluminum. Inside, there were terrazzo floors, red marble walls, doors padded with red leather, and elegant multicoloured hardwood.

It’s a charming jewel of a little building. The madness is that we’ve left it virtually abandoned for years.

Over the last decade, the city has struggled to find commercial tenants for the site, preferably those who might have money of their own for renovations. But given the building was designed as a science education centre and observatory, twinning it with the Telus World of Science just makes sense.