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: What’s your role at ERA?
Philip Evans: I’m an architect and partner at the firm, working at the intersection of design, policy, and value in both urban and rural settings. My focus is on strategic interventions that aim to bring clarity to complex, often obscure problems and conditions. Whatever the intervention — whether it’s keeping, adding to, or replacing a building, transforming a landscape, or working with a community or a group of entrepreneurs — what matters most is that the work is meaningful to the context: to what’s already there and to what’s needed next.
AT: What kind of work does your studio do?
PE: From some perspectives, I run my own studio within the firm — but I’ve never really thought of it that way. I try to be as accessible and available as possible to everyone at ERA, engaging in ongoing dialogue through a range of initiatives that underpin our work. The simplest and best way I can describe the work my colleagues and I do is that we help shape conversations around the question: “What’s next?” I lead a range of projects that transform places in response to community needs and future resilience — churches, barns, community halls, walk-up apartment buildings — adapting them for future use and relevance while reflecting their existing value. This happens at a range of scales and in diverse settings across the country — from outport, mining, and farming communities to key urban centres of trade like Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. It’s as much an exercise in navigating economic and financing models as it is about shape-making and beautiful things. Our work involves context-sensitive adaptive reuse, conservation, infill, additions, and urban design.
AT: What do you think has changed about ERA as we’ve grown and evolved?
PE: I’ve been at ERA for 25 years. In the early days, our role as a firm on projects was quite passive. Today, we’re much more involved in shaping conversations from the outset. We’re architects and planners, but we’re also playing this mitigation role of being a heritage consultant. Those are actually two different roles that we’ve blended together over the years. Through the tension and harmony of those two capacities and lenses, we’re constantly learning lessons and reapplying them to the work we do. We’ve really learned to work across disciplines — our planners, policy makers, lawyers, architects, and writers all have a kind of cross-functional literacy that good design requires.
AT: How does the concept of heritage intersect with your work?
PE: In my experience, it’s a red flag when people define dynamic concepts like “heritage” or “conservation” as static or binary. We often focus so narrowly on buildings themselves that we overlook the behaviours, uses, and actions that give those physical things their meaning in the first place. Take a building that’s the third generation of built form on a particular site. What truly exists there — more than any one of those three iterations of brick and mortar — is a relationship to time and change within a community. It’s that intangible, evolving story that gives tangible things their value and character. What we try to do at ERA is make sure that the story remains legible, useful, and relevant to the future — not just a reference to a place we’ve already been.
AT: I love the idea that ultimately what makes tangible heritage valuable is something intangible.
PE: When you divorce any object from its social, economic, and political contexts, a strange kind of experiment unfolds. That dislocation doesn’t just raise the question of what we’re doing — it surfaces the deeper, more important question of why. In my experience, that’s the more urgent conversation, especially when it comes to heritage and, more importantly, the future of our cities.
As a student of building typologies, I’ve learned that our interventions — our change management strategies — can be naïve if they’re disconnected from the decisions that shaped them: where entrances are placed, how construction methods and technologies were chosen, what financing models were used, which voices were heard, and which ones weren’t. It’s in those specifics — often messy or awkward — that the real story lies.
AT: What do you see in ERA’s future?
PE: I don’t think our profession has fully settled or articulated what it is yet. Heritage — as just one of many public benefits — is steadily broadening as a concept, and it remains incredibly difficult to define. If the term heritage were replaced tomorrow, or if every heritage act and policy across Canada were abolished, ERA’s work wouldn’t change. We’d still be pursuing the same fundamental question: why? We’d still be thoughtful, curious people, committed to managing change in a sophisticated way that makes places richer, more resilient, and more livable.
As a society, we’re still in the early stages of having these conversations — and it’s genuinely exciting to be part of helping shape them.
Stay tuned for more interviews with ERA’s principals as our Meet the Principals series continues next week.
Portrait photography by Mina Markovic
