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?
Michael McClelland: I have a long history at ERA in that I helped found the firm with Edwin Rowse thirty-five years ago. Edwin and I had different backgrounds in heritage conservation — he’d worked in England on country houses and the House of Lords while I’d worked in the heritage departments at the City of Toronto and the City of Vancouver. We set up ERA as a kind of artisan studio where everyone got a good liberal education in architecture. But with time, we found that it wasn’t just architects who were interested in working here. Fine artists, historians, journalists, municipal planners, and heritage planners were too. So, ERA evolved into a hybrid office full of interdisciplinary people. I’ve always loved that. Bringing different ideas together in that way is crucial to working with the built environment in sophisticated, nuanced, and innovative ways.
AT: What kind of work does your studio do?
MM: I’ve played many simultaneous roles at ERA over the years — I work with everyone. Today, I have a small team within the office that works specifically with culture through thought leadership, communication, city building, advocacy, and heritage architecture and planning projects. We work on things like Art=Waterfront, an initiative addressing the lack of cultural spaces in Toronto by advocating for a cultural corridor across the city’s entire waterfront, and the Friends of Allan Gardens, a nonprofit working to steward and activate one of the city’s oldest public spaces.
AT: How would you describe ERA?
MM: People frequently say to me, “You have to identify your brand, your core vision, your mission.” I’ve always found that fuzzy. It’s difficult to pin down what we do in those terms. For me, the strongest way to communicate answers to those questions is through action. We tend to demonstrate what we’re interested in doing, rather than promote it. Broadly speaking, ERA is a heritage architecture and planning firm, but our work relates to so many dimensions of culture, society, and community. We’re never working with concepts of heritage in isolation. It’s important to us to play a leading role in interrogating and progressing how cultural values are changing and identifying what it means to cultivate a diverse, inclusive environment in the Canadian context, especially as opposed to what’s happening in the United States right now.
AT: How do you understand heritage?
MM: Heritage is always on the move, in the sense that it means different things at different times to different people. It wasn’t thought of that way twenty or thirty years ago. In French, the word is “patrimoine,” which is clearly related to “patronizing,” and “heritage” has often historically carried the same implication: It’s our heritage, not your heritage. In ERA’s work, we’re gradually understanding that we need to move away from that model and look at heritage as everything people value. We all recognize a monument, and that’s wonderful. But there’s a whole range of other things that are meaningful to people and communities in different ways — little houses on someone’s street, the uses of Chinatown, Everyday Modern apartment buildings, Indigenous landscapes — all of which need to be treated with consideration, openness, and respect. Apart from being equitable, that’s the only way to really understand the cultures of places and societies.
AT: How does that changing notion of heritage interact with other values?
MM: ERA is often asked to comment on how heritage fits in with other values, conditions, needs, and aims. We end up taking on a broader, ethical role of trying to balance things. We look at different values — social welfare, equality, environmental sustainability, economic viability, design concerns — and try to understand where they compete and where they can work together. I think of it as four wheels on a wagon — you need to get all the wheels turning together, only one of which is heritage, otherwise you’re going nowhere.
AT: ERA undertakes a range of projects that aren’t for clients: we publish books, organize events, host panel discussions, and even produce musicals. Why are these things important?
MM: All of that is vital to the work we do. Nothing exists passively or in isolation — you have to initiate, collaborate, and fight for the values you think are important. You can’t do that without having public conversations, sharing new ideas and perspectives, asking questions, promoting debate, and getting people to consider things in new ways. There are all kinds of media and forms that can be taken. As architects, it’s so crucial to be active in society, rather than just churning out buildings. That kind of cultural citizenship vastly enriches the architectural work we do and vice versa.
AT: What do you see in ERA’s future as it continues to grow and evolve?
MM: We’ve grown — not by intent, but because the clients we want to work with continually come back to us, and because we attract creative, dedicated people who are interested in innovating and looking at things in new ways. ERA now has an office in Calgary in addition to Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. We have smaller satellites in Hamilton and Collingwood. We’re an anomaly in that there are no other heritage firms in Canada working at our scale. We’re increasingly looking at our work in that global way. We’ll see where that takes us.
Main photograph by Benjamin Tersigni
