Azure Magazine has selected Centennial College A-Building—designed by DIALOG in collaboration with Smoke Architecture— as their top 10 favourite interiors for 2023. The top projects of the year crafted an unforgettable sense of place.
Azure Magazine looked at restaurants, retail spaces and other interior design projects that inspired them throughout the past year looking at colour, material, and form. The standouts had thoughtful approaches to building bold spatial experiences and strong brand identities.
Centennial College A-Building Expansion
The A-Building is a marvel of sustainable and inclusive design with Indigenous designs incorporated throughout. As Canada’s first LEED Gold, zero carbon, WELL certified, mass timber, higher-education facility, Centennial College A-Building is impressively environmental with carefully crafted interiors. The heart of the building is the Indigenous Commons, a sustainably sourced wooden dome interior inspired by the Anishinaabe Roundhouse — or Nimii-Idiwigamig — and the sweat lodge, as a space for drumming, dancing, smudging, and more. With a slight rise in the floor that follows the natural lean of the land outside, it naturally balances indoor and outdoor space.
Fanning out from the Commons is a ring of functional spaces including a central courtyard with Indigenous plantings and outdoor classrooms, Wisdom Hall (a student atrium designed on principles of the Midewigan as an open-frame bentwood teaching lodge), the Balance Centrestone (featuring Haudenosaunee wampum and Anishinaabe Grandfather — or Mishomis — teachings) and more.
About Azure Magazine
Azure is an award-winning, international magazine with a focus on contemporary architecture and design. With six issues a year, they deliver coverage of architecture, interiors, product design, landscape design and urbanism. Through profiles of top architects and designers, stories about transformative projects, and trend news from major design fairs around the world, AZURE anticipates the future, provides invaluable insight and shines a spotlight on the issues, ideas and people that matter.
