Ideas & Issues
Conference in Charleston
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Recently Andrew Pruss and Jan Kubanek traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to attend the Association for Preservation Technology International Conference, 2012. Jan Kubanek presented on Sharon Temple, a fascinating project ERA has had the opportunity to work on for several years. Jan’s presentation focused on the importance of working collaboratively with an interdisciplinary team. In...
Read MoreToronto Zoning Reform to Empower Apartment Neighbourhoods
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As part of ongoing work on Tower Neighbourhood Renewal, the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) has been working with partners United Way Toronto and the City of Toronto to establish a new approach to zoning that will enable Toronto’s hundreds of Apartment Neighbourhoods to emerge as more complete and better-served communities. This work...
Read MoreAmendments to Heritage Policies in Toronto’s Official Plan
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The City of Toronto has just brought forward draft Official Plan Amendment No. 199 regarding Public Realm and Heritage policies. In May of this year, a staff report recommending the adoption of revised heritage policies was brought forward, and a public open house was scheduled. Prior to the public open house on September 10th, ERA...
Read MoreHealth and urban design: Two new reports released
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The Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) is pleased to announce the release of two reports examining public health, urban policy, and neighbourhood rejuvenation in Toronto: Strong Neighbourhoods and Complete Communities: A New Approach to Zoning for Apartment Neighbourhoods, and Toward Healthy Apartment Neighbourhoods: A Healthy Toronto by Design Report In partnership with United...
Read MoreHealth, zoning and urban design: Two new reports released
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The Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) has announced the release of two reports examining public health, urban policy, and neighbourhood rejuvenation in Toronto: Strong Neighbourhoods and Complete Communities: A New Approach to Zoning for Apartment Neighbourhoods, and Toward Healthy Apartment Neighbourhoods: A Healthy Toronto by Design Report In partnership with United Way Toronto and Toronto...
Read MoreProposed Heritage Policies in the ‘Toronto Official Plan’ Review
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As part of the current review of the Toronto Official Plan, new heritage policies have been drafted and presented to City Council for public discussion. Over the past months, we here at ERA have thoroughly reviewed the proposed municipal heritage policies. We are concerned that a great opportunity may be lost, for three key reasons: 1. The proposed policies primarily address regulatory and process issues rather than goals and objectives, 2. They don’t significantly advance us beyond the status quo, and 3. They show no sense of strategic implementation. Simply stated, why do we want to protect heritage resources? With an awareness of what we are not doing well, how can we do it better?
Read MoreThe city as garden
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Recently ERA’s Brendan Stewart gave a talk at Toronto’s Metro Hall, sponsored by LEAF and Park People, on the design potential of trees in cities. After setting the context of modern landscape design, beginning with André Le Nôtre’s French tradition and William Kent’s English tradition, the talk moved on to survey several interesting historical and...
Read MoreOntario Place: Possible futures
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Currently on show at Toronto’s Urbanspace Gallery is a compelling exhibition on Ontario Place and its future. Ontario Place was designed in the late 1960s by Eberhard Zeidler and launched in 1971 as a spectacular architectural innovation that attempted to rethink our relationship to the lake. Earlier this year the Government of Ontario announced that...
Read MoreTrees in Public Space: ERA’s Brendan Stewart Speaks
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International Influences: Inspiring Ideas for Trees in Public Space, August 16, 2012, 7pm, Metro Hall, Toronto Presented in collaboration with LEAF and Park People, Brendan’s talk discussed the rich aesthetic traditions and histories of planting trees in gardens, parks, and urban open spaces. Through images of beautiful and inspirational designed landscapes from around the world,...
Read MoreDetroit’s new “Creative Ventures” announced
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Recently the Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3) announced the 2012/13 round of its Creative Ventures project. DC3, a partnership between Business Leaders for Michigan and the College for Creative Studies, seeks to enhance the collective potential of Detroit’s creative community and grow its creative economy. This kind of initiative is key to the increasing role...
Read MoreUnited Way AGM: Graeme Stewart’s Keynote Address
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On Thursday, June 21, ERA’s Graeme Stewart addressed United Way’s AGM as keynote speaker. In 2010, ERA and CUG+R published Tower Neighbourhood Renewal in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which looks at a broad range of historical trends, planning issues, sustainability concerns, social needs, and opportunity for renewal in and around Toronto’s tower block neighbourhoods. In...
Read MoreMicro-enterprise on Toronto’s streets
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In early June, Working Habitat and Scadding Court Community Centre (SCCC) hosted a charrette exploring opportunities for small-scale enterprise and pop-up vendors in Toronto. The charrette introduced important lessons and concepts from Scadding Court’s experiences with Market 707. Located just east of Bathurst on the south side of Dundas, Market 707 is a cluster of...
Read MoreRevitalizing Ontario Place: ERA’s Lara Herald on CBC
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Lara Herald, a project landscape architect at ERA, was recently invited to speak with Matt Galloway on CBC’s Metro Morning regarding the future of Toronto’s Ontario Place. A cluster of three artificial islands on Toronto’s waterfront, Ontario Place was launched in 1971 as an affordable and varied summer destination. Its attractions have over time included...
Read MoreERA opens its doors
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Last Saturday ERA Architects participated in a Doors Open tour organized by Toronto Society of Architects. Doors Open is an annual opportunity for the public to visit places and spaces of historic, cultural, or architectural interest. This year ERA opened its doors and was very pleased to host a wide range of interested visitors, from...
Read MoreDoors Open at ERA: Sat. May 26, 2012
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Doors Open Toronto is an annual event that celebrates the city and its rich history of architecture and urban design, providing access to buildings that are otherwise inaccessible. This year, ERA Architects is excited to be taking part in the Architect’s Studiotour organized by the Toronto Society of Architects. We would be pleased if you’d...
Read MoreAlan Dudeck joins us for a chat
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Recently ERA welcomed to our office special guest Alan Dudeck, an urban planner, project manager, realtor, and member of the Toronto Preservation Board. He came to speak to us about his experience of an exciting period in the early 1970s when urban planning became community planning. Working under contract with the City of Toronto planning...
Read MoreThe Growing Old City
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Image courtesy of OpenFile. Interesting article on the population of the Old City of Toronto in Open File: We finally have more people living in pre-amalgamation Toronto than in 1971 With 736,775, we’ve now surpassed the Old City of Toronto’s peak population in 1971 (it dipped by 100,000 in the 70s and 80s) – but...
Read MoreMiles Glendinning Lecture, May 3rd, 2012
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ERA Architects and the Toronto Society of Architects present the 2012 Modern Heritage Visiting Lecture, Miles Glendinning: The Hundred Years War: A Century of Mass Housing ‘Campaigns’ Across the World. Join us May 3rd at the Art and Letters Club at 6:00pm for cocktails and lecture at 6:30. For more information and to RSVP, click...
Read MoreConcrete Ideas
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The book Concrete Ideas: Material to Shape a City was launched in January, 2012. Edited by Pina Petricone, the book considers new approaches to concrete architecture by exploring a variety of new technologies and possibilities for the material. First introduced by Pina’s article in Concrete Toronto, the book is a compilation of ideas, articles and...
Read MoreOleleshwa Primary School phase 1 Complete
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Last week ERA’s Alec Ring and his collegue Karl Sarkis, who recently left ERA to complete his Masters, gave us an update on the construction progress of their inspiring design project for Oleleshwa Primary School in the village of Ewaso Ngiro, Kenya. While in Kenya in the spring of 2010 Alec and Karl, working with...
Read MoreTar Creek Supergrid in the Standard
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Amy, one of ERA’s latest recruits, was recently featured in the Toronto Standard. Her Master’s thesis (completed with Clint Langevin) was a large-scale, radical proposal to utilize toxic sites in North America for future ecologically-oriented development. The full description of the project makes for a very interesting read.
Read MoreToronto Heritage and Paul Oberman
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Following the recent Toronto Heritage Awards, Bert Archer published an article in the Toronto Standard that questions the common usage of the word ‘heritage’, and pays tribute to the late Paul Oberman. The kind of work Oberman did is known as adaptive reuse, and its widespread practice here sets Toronto apart from most cities in...
Read MoreERA x Sweden
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This month a number of ERAers took a trip to Sweden, in order to kick off a neighbourhood rejuvenation project at Semlal Lagerlöfs Torg in Gothenberg. Following the extensive site tour and project brief, the team visited precedent projects in Stockholm, Malmo and Copenhagen to view the latest in housing design and neighbourhood renewal from...
Read MoreOn mapping
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With any exercise in mapping there are a whole series of interesting Borges-like adventures that reveal themselves. There is the story or stories the map-writer wishes to tell, but to the map-reader there are countless other stories which may appear as unpredictable discoveries beyond the intentional. As a child, playing the game of ‘connect the...
Read MoreWellbeing Toronto
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The City of Toronto has just launched ‘Wellbeing Toronto‘, which, in their own words, is: a new web-based measurement and visualization tool that helps evaluate community wellbeing across the city’s 140 neighbourhoods. Using geographic information software, Wellbeing Toronto allows you to select, combine and weight the significance of a number of indicators that monitor neighbourhood...
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