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Centennial College announced last month that it has selected partners EllisDon, DIALOG and Smoke Architecture to construct the first zero-carbon, mass timber higher-education building in the country. The $105-million expansion to the Progress Campus A Block building will be the gateway structure at Centennial’s Progress Campus in Scarborough. It will embody the college’s commitment to Truth and Reconciliation and sustainable design.
“We wanted to raise the bar for future post-secondary projects,” said college president and CEO Craig Stephenson. “We view sustainability, inclusivity and Indigeneity as wholly interconnected ideas, and we wanted a building that demonstrates that crucial relationship.”
The design firms, DIALOG and Smoke Architecture, approached the project using a uniquely Canadian concept of “two-eyed seeing”—or viewing the world through the lens of Indigenous knowledge and the lens of western knowledge. The resulting design brings together Indigenous and Western cultures in both the form and function.
“This project grows beyond the simplistic application of Indigenous elements onto a mainstream design,” said Eladia Smoke, principal of Anishinaabeg-owned and operated Smoke Architecture. “This design is rooted in Indigenous principles, evoked in a contemporary setting. The building’s narrative is a story of seed, growth, culmination, and balance, revealing the seven directions teachings in a cyclical view of an interconnected world.”
Students will enter the building from the east (informed by regional Anishinaabe architecture, respecting the sunrise as a good place to begin), encountering a grand staircase that forms part of the Wisdom Hall, an active multi-storey space of convergence for students, staff and visitors that connects people to Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe creation stories. The life of the building revolves around an Indigenous Commons that opens up into a central courtyard with native plantings. Indigenous concepts of community, biophilia (reaffirming a connection with nature), and sustainability are embedded in the design.
The A Block expansion creates an array of new academic spaces with flexible classrooms that support active learning and Indigenous ways of teaching and being. There are new labs for the School of Engineering Technology and Applied Science program and numerous informal spaces for collaboration and socialization.
In total the project will add over 150,000 square feet of new and renovated space to help meet the anticipated growth in student enrolment at the college—without adding to its carbon footprint.
“This project will be a clear demonstration of how higher-education facilities can make an important contribution to reducing environmental harm by eliminating CO2 emissions,” said Craig Applegath, Project Principal, DIALOG. “Its zero-carbon emissions design, and its ability to store thousands of tonnes of carbon in its sustainably harvested mass timber wood structure, will be an important precedent in both Canada and around the world."
According to EllisDon, which will lead the design-build project, the expansion could become the first post-secondary mass timber facility completed in Toronto.
“EllisDon’s mass timber specialists eagerly anticipate working closely with Centennial College and our design partners at DIALOG and Smoke Architecture to create this precedent-setting project,” said Geoff Smith, CEO, EllisDon. “Centennial College’s A Block [expansion] project delivers us all the wonderful opportunity to construct sustainable structures that are not only beautifully functional, but more importantly help immediately address the critical challenges posed by climate change.”
The building is scheduled to open in 2023.