Inside Centennial College’s New, Zero-Carbon Addition

2024 Best of Year Winner for Larger Higher Education

A mass-timber, zero-carbon structure, the 133,000-square-foot, six-story addition to Centennial College’s School of Engineering Technology and Applied Science in Scarborough, Canada, comprises of flexible classrooms, collaborative spaces, administrative offices, a café, and a courtyard that’s also an outdoor classroom. A-Building, by Dialog and Smoke Architecture, integrates Indigenous principles and cultural markers with a contemporary aesthetic, an ethos reflected in such elements as the Wisdom Hall, a central atrium with bleacher seating enriched by artwork on wooden ceiling baffles evoking traditional Ojibwa canoe paddles; the Indigenous Commons, a domed, circular space for gathering and ceremony, embodying the principles of Anishinabe roundhouse design; and an exterior cladding of aluminum “fish scales” that suggests animal skin and gives the sense that the building itself is alive.

PROJECT TEAM: CHEN COHEN; CRAIG APPLEGATH; JUAN CARLOS PORTUESE; JASON D’ALTROY; FARAH AL AMIN; CAMILLE GANUELAS; KELLY DEMINGS; MEL FAIFMAN; MAYA JARRAH (DIALOG); ELADIA SMOKE; LARISSA ROQUE; CHELSEA JACOBS; JULIE BÉDARD (SMOKE ARCHITECTURE).