Centennial College – Library Addition, Parking Lot and Servicing Improvements

Education • Scarborough, Toronto • ON

EMC Group's civil scope encompassed the parking lot redesign, site grading, stormwater management, and underground servicing improvements required to support both the new building footprint and the transformed campus circulation. The realignment of the primary campus access drive—now passing beneath the new building— required coordinated regrading of the surrounding parking areas, revised storm drainage patterns to handle altered runoff from the reconfigured impervious surfaces, and updated municipal servicing connections to the City of Toronto's infrastructure along Ashtonbee Road.

As an automotive technology campus where vehicle circulation is not just practical but programmatic—students train on real vehicles daily—the parking and access design carried heightened importance. EMC Group ensured that the civil infrastructure delivered safe, efficient vehicular and pedestrian flows while supporting the architect's vision of a building that celebrates the relationship between architecture and the automobile.

Civil engineering for a campus built around cars

New Library and Student Hub—with an additional 42,500 sq ft of campus renovations

Clear span of the building over the realigned campus entry drive—requiring complete site reconfiguration

Parking lot design and servicing improvements

Gold certification targeted—with LEED-supportive site design, stormwater management, and servicing

2017 OAA Design Excellence Award, 2016 OLA New Library Building Award, and City of Toronto Urban Design Award

A gateway building for Ontario's oldest college

The campus renewal fundamentally transformed how vehicles, pedestrians, and services interact across the Ashtonbee campus site. The previous layout—dominated by a sprawling, undifferentiated parking area fronting an aging brown-brick campus virtually unreadable from Ashtonbee Road—gave way to a clearly organized site with the new Library and Student Hub establishing a prominent street presence and a defined campus gateway.

Key elements of EMC Group's civil engineering program included:

Planning a Campus Development Project?

The civil design was coordinated with the architect's broader campus master plan, which envisioned future expansion to the north and west, with the Library building eventually forming the southern edge of a new campus quadrangle—meaning the site infrastructure had to accommodate not just the immediate project but the college's long-term development trajectory.

Centennial College, Ontario's oldest publicly funded college, has seen library visits roughly triple since the new facility opened. The Ashtonbee Campus renewal consolidated library services, a student hub and commons, bookstore, wellness centre, study spaces, and student services into a single, architecturally significant building that gives the campus a visible identity from Ashtonbee Road for the first time. The 90-metre-long glazed structure—with its mirrored stainless-steel underside reflecting traffic passing beneath—has become one of the most recognized pieces of campus architecture in the Greater Toronto Area.

The project's recognition by the Ontario Association of Architects, the Ontario Library Association, and the City of Toronto reflects the quality of the entire consultant team: the architect, the structural engineer (structural engineering), the consultant (commissioning), and the civil, mechanical, and electrical disciplines that brought this ambitious campus vision to life.

EMC Group is proud to have provided the site engineering that underpins one of Toronto's most celebrated campus buildings—demonstrating that award-winning architecture depends on precisely coordinated civil infrastructure at every level.

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From college and university expansions to campus master plans and institutional servicing, EMC Group delivers the civil engineering expertise that supports award-winning educational architecture—built to serve students for generations.