For 35 years, ERA Architects has been a strategic thought leader in understanding the ever-evolving phenomenon of heritage. As the firm evolves, so does our approach to working with heritage.
Our interdisciplinary talents, insights, and relationships to the existing built environment lead us to understand places as living through time. As people, communities, values, and societies change, it’s essential to form new avenues and ways of interpreting the places they experience and value. Through our diverse perspectives, expertise, and passions, it’s equally important to remain constant in our stewardship of the relationships between people and their environments.
To showcase how ERA’s studios approach this work in different yet complementary ways, this series of conversations between culture critic Alessandro Tersigni and the firm’s principals will showcase where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and how this array of practices both enriches and productively complicates our approach to understanding and working with heritage in the 21st century.
Alessandro Tersigni: Tell me a bit about your background and how you came to ERA.
Andrew Pruss: I’m trained as an architect and have practiced in Toronto for more than 35 years, 22 of which have been at ERA. Before that, I worked largely managing infill and adaptive reuse projects and had a great interest in the histories and contexts of places. When I joined ERA, Michael and Edwin were leading a firm of about a dozen people, and they gave me the opportunity to work on the transformation of The Distillery District, where we’ve been involved ever since. That’s really how we like to work — as facilitators and partners providing expertise that manifests in existing places, sometimes over long periods of time.
AT: What kind of work does your studio do?
AP: We work with adaptive reuse, conservation, and heritage planning, all of which are huge undertakings because they involve arguing for particular visions of interpretations, transformations, and stewardship while meeting the regulatory requirements and supplying the technical underpinnings to make them happen. We bring knowledge and understanding to our work that’s increasingly rare, about historic materials and construction, and the building types associated with that. To take one example, why were Toronto’s historic churches built the way they were? Today, we think of churches as symbolic buildings, but they were actually designed as functional machines for the inhabitation of congregations. That understanding is important for addressing the reuse of churches as congregations dwindle and communities shift.
AT: How does ERA differ from other firms?
AP: ERA started small, but with a multidisciplinary approach. We’ve since grown to fulfil our aspiration and build our capacity so we can work with existing places at every stage and scale: pre-planning, policy, strategy, and implementation, not just with architecture but also landscapes and intangible management. Heritage firms have usually been small and focused around individuals or founders. We’re different — and rather than having departments that execute particular types of work — we have groups or studios of multidisciplinary individuals that can tackle projects holistically. They’re similar in some ways but productively different in others. For example, Graeme and Ya’el’s Tower Renewal Initiative deals with existing places that are not necessarily capital H heritage but require renewed relevance and sustainable development or transformation. Looking at overlapping frameworks with the same goals and seeing how they complement or strengthen each other is a huge learning opportunity for us as a practice.
AT: What has stayed the same throughout your years with ERA and what has changed?
AP: Heritage work has traditionally been about preserving existing places. Today, that approach of setting up a singular understanding of a particular site that’s intended to endure over time is less and less relevant. What ERA does is engage with and define how places can be relevant in a contemporary world and into the future. We often figure out how to make buildings that were designed for one worldview or activity relevant for new ones. Industrial sites become mixed-use neighbourhoods, churches become other types of meeting places, and hospitals retain their community importance as focal points of science and technology, while both of those fields change rapidly and dramatically. All of that is about understanding change and managing it to achieve valuable outcomes.
AT: What’s an example of a current project that illustrates that mindset?
AP: One that comes to mind is the Canary Building in the new Canary District in the West Don Lands. It’s actually a very traditional heritage conservation project and representative of settler construction in a sense. The oldest part of the building dates from 1864 — it was one of the first schools in Toronto, was added to, and then it became a hotel, and then a factory. Today, the site’s been taken on by an Indigenous owner and forms part of the Canary District’s Indigenous Hub. The oppositionality of the static heritage building and the new Indigenous Hub represents a challenge. I don’t know if it’s reconcilable. But it also reflects an important intersection and shift that we need to tackle in our work across Toronto and Canada generally.
AT: What do you see in ERA’s future as it continues to grow and evolve?
AP: Heritage theory is about reflecting on the past, potentially conserving or honouring it, and planning for the future. That’s an approach that has a lot of currency and mirrors parallel frameworks in sustainability or an Indigenous worldview. The commonality is an engagement with continuity rather than obsolescence or replacement. Ideas of renewal weren’t necessarily always at the forefront of design professions. They’ve become very important in the last 50 years, but that was a starting point for ERA. This is a radically changing world — it’s important to keep recognizing allies, learn from them, and adopt big-tent thinking rather than exclusionary thinking. That’s what ERA is investing in.
Portrait photography by Mina Markovic
