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?
Ya’el Santopinto: I’m a principal at the firm, and I lead our resilience practice, an array of projects centred on the modernization, quality improvement, and decarbonization with a focus on community building and affordable housing. This includes our Tower Renewal Initiative, which I co-lead with studio partner Graeme Stewart. Typically, I’m working with multi-unit residential buildings — whether they’re shelter, transitional, affordable, or deeply affordable housing — and finding ways to give them a second life and meet the challenges of the 21st century.
AT: What kind of work does your studio do?
YS: Our overarching goal has been to ask ourselves what good-quality housing is. It turns out that the answer is multifactorial. It’s about sustainability, but it’s equally about the five-minute city and access to amenities, resources, and your community. Our challenge is often thinking about how to produce those qualities in places like Toronto’s inner suburbs that weren’t designed that way. When we get approached by owners to decarbonize a building, we say, “Great, we’ll do that, but first we’re going to look at how to make this building a healthier and more comfortable place to live.” Carbon reduction will always follow if you start with comfort.
AT: Do you think that the relationship between the different values of good-quality housing changes over time?
YS: Our perception of the relationship is constantly changing. In the postwar era, Canada built a huge stock of multi-unit housing. That construction was based on modernist, best-in-class ideas that were imported here from the United Kingdom and other places in Europe. Fifty or 60 years later, those same buildings no longer met people’s aesthetic vision of what housing should look like and they were tearing them down, famously in Regent Park. When we started the Tower Renewal Partnership, the first thing we had to do was make visible everything that’s great about these mid-century towers. They’re big, they’re bright, they’re built from strong 1960s concrete, and they’re fantastic places to live, with much more generous units than we’re building today. We had to do the cultural work of telling that story by writing books, leading tours, and working with the National Film Board.
AT: How does that work relate to our history and built legacy?
YS: When we walk into a new community, we stop and do a lot of learning and listening before picking up a pen. That’s consistent with ERA’s approach to working with buildings that have historic designations or significant architectural fabric. It’s the same toolkit. We’re not demolishing buildings — we’re renewing them. In the context of our current housing crisis, it turns out that preserving housing is, in fact, supplying housing. The work that our studio does is less about preserving architectural expression and more about making a particular kind of community possible, but fundamentally, we’re all using a unique set of skills to tackle challenges with our built forms. As notions about what constitutes significance in those places continue to change, these approaches will blend even more.
AT: What do you see in ERA’s future as it continues to grow and evolve?
YS: ERA has been extremely radical since its inception in the sense that we’ve always approached architecture by trying to understand the larger ecosystems of cities. For example, the transformation of The Distillery District wasn’t just about the adaptive reuse of buildings — it was about creating policies and structures so that the neighbourhood could be reanimated through the arts. I think ERA continues to be radical simply by asking, “How does a city change?” Our projects are successful based on how they answer that question. We’ve always been a firm that’s concerned with systems, culture, and the relationships between cities and their residents. That orientation perfectly positions us to respond to a great diversity of emerging and overlapping challenges, values, and paradigms.
Portrait photography by Mina Markovic
