Skip to content

ERA Architects

Projects/

Development & Urban Planning

Spotlight

Two people standing together in front of a board of photos. Regent Park Interpretation Strategy

Regent Park is the largest social housing neighbourhood built in Canada’s history, with a layered history of development through several eras. Since 2005, it has been undergoing extensive revitalization, moving towards a more mixed-use and mixed-income neighbourhood. To celebrate the neighbourhoods history, Toronto Community Housing Corporation commissioned ERA to design a commemoration strategy. The strategy’s...

Market Square Heritage Conservation District Plan Update

At the core of Kingston’s historic downtown is the Market Square Heritage Conservation District – an area defined by a fine collection of 19th and 20th buildings encircling the city’s Market Square. The District, originally written by Lily Inglis and Harold Kalman, is one of the earliest commercial heritage conservation districts in Ontario. The District...

Alma College Square

This significant and historic property is situated on the former grounds of Alma College, an important Victorian-era private girls’ school in St Thomas, Ontario. The College, although cherished by the community and its many alumnae, was closed in the 1980s and the property, along with its fine Gothic Revival building and rustic ravine amphitheatre, was...

Grange Park Grange Park

Grange Park, a two-hectare public open space south of the Art Gallery of Ontario, is a rare surviving example of an early 19th century former residential estate. Although the grounds have evolved considerably, the terraced, axial and irregular elliptical layout in the Picturesque-Gardenesque style retains a high level of integrity. Today the park serves as...

Victoria University in the University of Toronto

The oldest among the University of Toronto’s federated universities, Victoria University and its campus are an expression of dynamic, complex and current programmatic needs. Following ERA’s assessment of University of Toronto-owned resources across its St. George Campus in downtown Toronto, ERA was retained by Victoria University to undertake a similar assessment to guide the stewardship,...

View of the entrance to Lawrence Orton apartment Lawrence-Orton

Toronto Community Housing’s Lawrence Orton campus is a 336-unit complex completed in 1969, which houses more than 1,000 residents. It was selected by TCHC for their landmark ‘ReSet’ program which directs comprehensive capital repair and social reinvestment at a campus scale to revitalize the most challenged sites in their portfolio. Since 2014, ERA Architects, in...

Arial view of Booth Street Booth Street Redevelopment Master Plan

Ottawa’s Booth Street Complex — bordered by Booth, Norman, Rochester, and Orangeville streets in Little Italy — was acquired in 2012 by Canada Lands Company from the federal government. The conditions of the transfer required that best efforts be made to conserve the heritage character of the former federal heritage buildings, and that the spirit...

The St. Hilda's tower St. Hilda’s Towers Transformation

St. Hilda’s Towers is a not-for-profit senior care community located in the Dufferin and Eglinton neighbourhood, providing more than three hundred units of affordable housing. Since 2017, ERA has worked with St. Hilda’s Towers and the City of Toronto to scope and implement a long-term stewardship plan, beginning with renewing the towers to be more...

4301 Kingston

ERA Architects, in joint venture with SvN Architects and Planners, has completed the deep energy retrofit of 4301 Kingston, a 419-unit complex completed in 1968 in east Scarborough which houses more than 1,000 residents, and owned by Toronto Community Housing. The project improved tenant health, comfort, and safety, while reducing utility consumption and GHG emissions...

Mirvish Village

Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village have been fixtures of Toronto’s Bloor and Bathurst neighbourhood for more than 60 years. The famed discount retailer, and public realm created by Markham Street’s adaptive reuse as a cultural and commercial enclave in the 1960s, evolved through the influence of the Mirvish Family and neighbourhood communities, including the Afro-Caribbean...

University of Toronto St. George Campus

For much of Toronto’s history, the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus has existed as a distinct area at the centre of the city. This institutional urban landscape encompasses the University, its federated universities and colleges, and Ontario’s seat of government, among other institutions. Its early establishment and patterns of land ownership have shaped the...

The Crosstown: EGLINTONconnects

ERA, alongside Brook McIlroy, planningAlliance, City of Toronto, and others, received the 2015 Canadian Institute of Planners Award for Planning Excellence for the comprehensive project report, EGLINTONconnects. The project report also won the Award of Merit for the Visions and Master Plans Category in the 2015 Toronto Urban Design Awards.  EGLINTONconnects, also known as The...

Selma Göteberg

ERA and Arup collaborated to join a number of European firms in a parallel commission to reimagine the Swedish suburb of Selma Göteberg. Surprisingly, the neighbourhood bore a number of interesting similarities to Toronto suburbs, including post-war modernist planning strategies (Toronto’s inspired in part by Swedish thinkers, in fact), aging 1960s infrastructure, a diverse resident...

Evergreen Brick Works Kilns at Evergreen Brick Works

“Building 16” at the Brick Works housed several massive kilns built in the 1960s for firing and drying bricks. The kilns were fascinating artifacts, but their sheer size – 600 linear metres occupying three-quarters of the building – made the space impossible to use. By dissecting the kilns to reveal their hidden spaces and internal...

Recent Projects

Relic Linear Park Campbell House Museum Foundation
Toronto
plazaPOPS plazaPOPS
Greater Toronto Area
Centretown Heritage Inventory City of Ottawa
Ottawa
Exploratory typo-morphological study of Île-d’Orléans Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec (MCCQ)
l’Île-d’Orléans