Seneca College King Campus Expansion
King City, Ontario
Client : Seneca College
Area : 198,000 sf
Program : Varsity Gymnasium, Fitness Centre, Climbing Wall, Library, Classrooms, Lecture Theatre, Labs, Student Federation Suite, Café, Outdoor Program (Campus Quad, Athletic Commons, Multi-Purpose Pond including Rainwater Harvesting, Reading Garden)
Associated Architects : Montgomery Sisam Architects
On the outskirts of King City, Ontario, Seneca College’s King Campus is a small but growing commuter campus that occupies a secluded property surrounded by the rich natural landscape of the Oak Ridges Moraine. Comprising both learning and recreational spaces, Magna Hall is King Campus’s dominant building, the prime contributor to the projected doubling of its enrolment over the next decade. In this, it defines a new urban landscape still under development, providing a framework for future growth, and positioning the campus as a leader in conservation and environmental stewardship.
Magna Hall takes every opportunity to connect to its surroundings both physically and visually, with exterior plazas, gardens, and walkways. The project takes aesthetic cues from the surrounding terrain; the landscape architecture, for instance, is expressed as a series of platforms, with meadowlands for recreational programming, grasses and planted beds at gathering areas, and shade trees in its plazas. An artificial pond serves as fire water storage, stormwater management, and irrigation supply.
Like the landscaping, the exterior material palette reflects the surroundings, with wood, masonry, and standing seam metal foremost. Muntz metal, an alloy that offers superior corrosion resistance to copper, will patinate over time into a shade that harmonizes with the surrounding plantings. The warm interior colour palette similarly echoes local flora, in grass yellow, maple red, dogwood crimson, and cornflower purple.
A broad 200,000-square-foot building up to six storeys in height, Magna Hall was erected using a system of locally manufactured web-corrugated steel, reducing the amount of material and the corresponding carbon footprint. This step toward its LEED Gold target is further boosted a host of sustainability features: high-efficiency HVAC, high-performance envelope, high-efficiency lighting with occupancy and daylight controls, and low-flow fixtures that conserve 40 percent more water than LEED baseline requires.
The program within comprises a wide range of spaces, from a library, learning commons, classrooms and laboratories to student offices, flexible event spaces, and a gymnasium and fitness area. The resulting wealth of programming allows students to learn in a state-of-the-art facility, and to relax or be active between classes. In promoting a well-rounded student experience, Magna Hall has enabled the campus to improve quality of campus life and vastly increase the number of full-time students within a single facility.