Community Engagement
Harvest Festival in Thorncliffe Park
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On Saturday, September 26th, the Third Not-So-Annual Harvest Festival took place in Thorncliffe Park. Hosted by not-for-profit Diasporic Genius (DG), the festival featured a pop-up Women’s Cultural Café, an initiative of the Thorncliffe Action Group (TAG). Diasporic Genius, TAG, and ERA Architects collaborated to design, build, and run this dynamic pop-up café. Thorncliffe Action Group (TAG)...
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Visit the Markham House!
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This Saturday, September 19, 2015, Mirvish Village will be hosting the grand opening of the Markham House, located at 610 Markham Street. Doors will open from 11:00am to 6:00pm, providing guests the opportunity to revel in an abundance of festivities. There will be food and drinks presented by tasty cafes and restaurants from the Annex...
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Workshopping Ideas for the Upcoming Bell Island Build
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Culture of Outports (CoO) uses research, design, and planning to help support liveable communities undergoing economic and cultural change after the closure of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery. These communities are often struggling with ways to move forward following the decline in traditional livelihoods. For the past four years, ERA has collaborated with students and community members...
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ERA Heads to the Yukon!
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From the Gold Rush to present-day film festivals, from traditional First Nation livelihoods to contemporary eco-tourism, the architecture and natural landscape of the Yukon has a plethora of stories to share.The Klondike region of the Yukon holds a central place in Canadian history due to these stories. The Klondike-Tr’ondëk site is now up for nomination for a UNESCO...
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The Ward: A new book, UPDATE
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ERA is excited to announce our new book all about Toronto’s St. John’s Ward. The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood, launches May 20th. See our previous post here. A number of events lead up to this exhilarating new release. The Ward will be presented in the Pages UnBound Festival, an annual mixed...
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Inspiring City Builders of Tomorrow: ERA & Jane’s Walk
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This spring ERA helped Jane’s Walk with the School Edition Program, a five-week curriculum designed to create student-led walking tours in two schools’ neighbourhoods. The program helps kids to get engaged in thinking about – and interacting with – their built environment in new and exciting ways. ERA’s Sara Jazaeri and Jasmine Frolick joined a...
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The community that could: The Storefront shares its story
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Recently the East Scarborough Storefront published a report documenting a number of aspects of their path to neighbourhood renewal. Since the Storefront’s approach has proven so successful, this report is very valuable for other communities interested in making some positive changes to the neighbourhood. Since the late 1990s, the East Scarborough Storefront has been facilitating...
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Newfoundland field research (by guest blogger Kathryn Douthart)
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For the past five years, ERA’s Culture of Outports team has been working with rural communities along Newfoundland’s coast to foster liveable communities through research, design, and planning. In the summer of 2014, Culture of Outports worked with Mitacs, a not-for-profit organization that builds working relationships between academia and industry by placing research interns with organizations...
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Allan Gardens Harvest Festival
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On September 28, the Friends of Allan Gardens (FOAG) hosted its first Urban Harvest Festival in one of Toronto’s most historic parks. Three hundred people joined us to celebrate autumn amid the colouring trees and early-20th century greenhouses of Allan Gardens. With the generous support of TD Bank, FOAG collaborated with Food Forward, a food...
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Sept. 11: Toronto the Good Party!
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Toronto the Good is a party thrown each year by ERA Architects and friends to celebrate Toronto and contemplate its history and evolution with fellow architects, designers, thinkers, and urban-minded people. This year: Election Theme! Co-hosted by Dave Meslin and RaBIT Thursday, Sept. 11, 7 to 11 pm at The Fermenting Cellar in the Distillery...
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Sports pad and Sky-o-swale launch in Scarborough
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Wednesday, August 20 from 3 to 6pm, join us and our friends at the The East Scarborough Storefront to launch two exciting new features in the landscape design. The Sky-o-swale shade-water structure is a green-roof pavilion that filters rainwater to irrigate the adjacent gardens, and the MLSE/Jumpstart Sports Court is a former parking lot converted...
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Charity Hicks’ passing
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Sad news reached us this week that Charity Hicks, a well-known Detroit-based activist and leader, passed away July 8, 2014. Ms. Hicks was an advocate for democracy, grass-roots engagement, and environmental and social justice. ERA had the privilege of witnessing a conversation between Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and Charity Hicks at the Detroit-Toronto Symposium in 2013, where...
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Grappling with heritage
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Recently ERA’s Michael McClelland spoke at a Doors Open Toronto event entitled “Redesigning Toronto.” The PechaKucha-style event moderated by Spacing’s Shaun Micallef asked several leading architects to speak about advancing the design of the city. Michael’s talk surveyed changing conceptions of heritage over the years, beginning with the traditional conception of grand and noble landmarks...
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Job Shadowing: Architectural Conservancy of Ontario
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ERA recently participated in the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s Second Annual Job Shadow Program, organized by the ACO’s NextGen group. Megan Rolph, Golsa Kheirmoghadam, Josie Harrington, and Amy Calder shadowed various members of the ERA team, attended meetings, visited job sites, studied current projects, and took part in our end-of-week office social. Special thanks to...
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Heritage Masonry with Dr. Gerard Lynch, May 13 to 22
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Masons, heritage professionals, architects, historians, and all interested parties: We invite you to join us for a new installment of Dr. Gerard Lynch’s extraordinary courses in brickwork, May 13 to 22 at Evergreen Brickworks, Toronto. Learn from scholar and master mason Gerard Lynch about traditional limes and mortars, traditional binders, historical forms of pointing and...
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Jane Jacobs Prize to Graeme Stewart & Sabina Ali
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The 2014 Jane Jacobs Prize has been awarded to Graeme Stewart of ERA and Sabina Ali of the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee. According to the creators of the Jane Jacobs Prize, Ideas that Matter, this honour “celebrates individuals who contribute to the fabric of Toronto life in unique ways that exemplify the ideas of Jane...
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New opportunities through zoning reform: Your feedback needed
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The City of Toronto wants to bring more vitality and convenience to its Apartment Neighbourhoods. In March and April, a number of public consultations will be held to incorporate the ideas of community members. A new zoning type, “Residential Apartment Commercial” (RAC), has been created to provide more amenities and more usable public space in...
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Big Idea Forum w/ Christopher Hume
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Monday March 24th, ERA’s Graeme Stewart will be joining Christopher Hume and guests for a forum on the future of Toronto. The discussion begins at 6:30 pm, Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, Toronto. The forum follows up on the Toronto Star’s Big Ideas series, in which local urbanists, activists, researchers, and citizens share their...
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Botwood build: complete
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As part of the Culture of Outports initiative, Andrew Pruss, Alana Young, Jordan Molnar, and Shelley Ludman recently collaborated with six Ryerson architecture students and residents of Botwood, Nfld. to design and build an intervention in the local landscape. The “Viewfinder” is a wood-frame, open-plank pavilion that serves as a shade structure, windbreak, and a...
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Charrette: Healthy Corner Stores
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On Saturday January 18, The East Scarborough Storefront hosted a public design charrette with partners United Way Toronto, Toronto Public Health (TPH), Sustainable TO, Architext, and ERA. Saturday’s discussion focused on TPH’s new program “Healthy Corner Stores,” a project that proposes to give suburban communities better access to fresh produce, and other healthy food options,...
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Junction Commons update
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As part of ongoing research and analysis of the Junction Commons Project (JCP) site at 209 Mavety St, ERA’s Graeme Stewart recently presented details of the site’s history at the JCP’s November town hall. In the 1940s and ‘50s the block surrounded by Keele, Dundas, Annette, and Mavety was redesigned to function as a public...
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Culture of Outports to Botwood, NL
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The Culture of Outports program is about to start up again, for our very first winter community build, in Botwood, Newfoundland. Culture of Outports is a series of projects that uses research, design, and planning to make modest interventions that engage with, and help support, livable communities undergoing economic and cultural change after the decline...
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Community Hub at former police station
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Together with the Junction Commons Project Community Group, ERA Architects and Urban Metrics are working with the residents of Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood to envision and examine the feasibility of transforming a former police station into a community hub. Division 11 of the Toronto Police Services recently relocated to an adapted 1913 schoolhouse designed by Stantec...
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Walking Tour of Yorkville (Part 2)
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Saturday May 25, 10 a.m., with ERA’s Michael McClelland and Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Meeting place: The base of the giant granite rock in Village of Yorkville Park (south side of Cumberland St., between Bellair St. and Avenue Rd.). Half a century ago, the village of Yorkville was a bohemian neighbourhood frequented...
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Dinner w/ Charles Birnbaum: Fri. May 24
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Friday May 24, 7 p.m., Gilead, 4 Gilead Place, Toronto You are invited to join Jamie Kennedy, Janet Rosenberg & Studio, ERA Architects, and honoured guest Charles Birnbaum for an ambulatory feast at Gilead. This feast celebrates the 131st anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s lecture on aesthetics at Toronto’s Allan Gardens, and will raise funds for...
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