For 35 years, ERA Architects has been a strategic thought leader in understanding the ever-evolving phenomenon of heritage. As the firm grows and our approach to working with heritage evolves, we welcome three new principals and one new director to lead and expand our innovative, adaptive, and forward-thinking practice.
To explore their experiences, reflections, and intentions as they step into their news roles, cultural critic Alessandro Tersigni sat down with new ERA principals Samantha Irvine, David Winterton, and Shelley Ludman and new ERA director Dan Eylon to discuss some of the ideas and questions that excite and guide them.
Alessandro Tersigni: Congratulations on being promoted to principal! Tell me a bit about your role at the firm.
David Winterton: Thank you! I’m an architect and architectural historian who works on a range of projects that intersect residential design and heritage, as well as communication initiatives, books, and mentorship programmes. What links and synthesizes a lot of my work is a drive to analyze the architectural layers of the city, understand the sequences that built it up through time, and reflect that back into contextual architectural designs. At ERA, we’re in this wonderful position of doing that well: we’ve nurtured the skills and lenses to help invigorate people’s understanding of the buildings they walk around every day and foster an affinity with.
AT: What are you envisioning as you step into this new appointment?
DW: I’ll continue all my stimulating architectural work while moving forward some key initiatives I’ve been involved with. That includes the fun job of leading ERA’s external communications committee, which represents our firm to the world by sharing the work we do broadly through a diversity of avenues, such as social media, press releases, narrative articles, interviews, and videos. I’ve also played a leading role in our intern and co-op architecture student placements. I cherish being a mentor and feel a great responsibility to inspire the next generation of architects and work with them to try their strengths and explore their interests. I’m also interested in writing more books! I recently completed a long-overdue monograph on the Edwardian Toronto architect Frank Darling, which will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press later this fall. I’d like to expand on all of these efforts as principal.
AT: How did you first end up at ERA?
DW: My trajectory at the firm is unusual. I started at ERA in the firm’s early days in 1999 and then moved to New York in 2004 for what I thought would be a short gig, where I ended up spending 12 great years with Robert A. M. Stern Architects (RAMSA). When I returned to ERA in 2017, I brought with me a robust toolkit of design skills and perspectives about understanding traditional architecture, its composition, and sophisticated and sensitive ways of placing it in context, which has complemented the work I do.
AT: How do you think ERA differs from other firms?
DW: There’s a hackneyed stereotype about cities that they’re palimpsests, these medieval texts whose pages have been repeatedly erased and rewritten with a succession of different works. But that’s not quite right — cities aren’t texts but rather assemblages of spaces and symbolic forms enduring over time. What ERA offers is our ability to interpret those many formal and material registers and architectural codes, ascertain their value and meaning, share this with our clients and the broader public, and bring all of it together to reactivate old places and create meaningful new spaces for our contemporary world.
AT: How does the concept of heritage intersect with your work?
DW: Phenomena like intangible heritage and cultural landscapes are fascinating and very important in the field’s current discourses. But for me, as an architect, heritage really is fundamentally about buildings and the various layers of meaning they comprise. I’m on the fuzzy edge of heritage orthodoxy, in that my approach is that it’s ok to blend rather than subordinate old to new architecture. That’s a legacy of my training at RAMSA, but I’ve probably always been sympathetic to this idea. I find the requirement to create conspicuous transitions — often performed by neutral glass grids — between existing fabric and new builds to sometimes be culturally condescending, as readable and efficient as they are. I think modern urbanites have the visual sophistication to admire architectural beauty and appreciate ambiguities between new and old. It’s not always imperative to artificially freeze them in separation. Buildings have always carried layered histories; their uses, meanings, and aesthetic impact shift over time. That evolution can be abrupt, or can be delightfully subtle, and I strive to reflect that in my work.
AT: What do you see in ERA’s future?
DW: There’s an extraordinary degree of urban change and transformation taking place in Toronto and other Canadian cities right now. As the last boom begins to cool and settle, ERA can play a significant role in analyzing the resulting built environment and showing how it might cohere more intentionally into 21st-century cities. After such rapid and disruptive change, a period of retrospection could allow city builders to take stock and weave those layers we talked about into something richer and unmistakably of this place. ERA is uniquely positioned to help define and guide that next chapter.
Portrait photography by Mina Markovic
