Development & Urban Planning

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, 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The University of Toronto is revising its 1997 Secondary Plan, creating a new Secondary Plan that will better reflect the evolving demands and expectations of the University, the City, and the provincial planning framework. The new Secondary Plan incorporates the objectives of such existing documents as the 2011 St. George Campus Master Plan, the Huron...

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...

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...

“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...

For this project, sited on King near John St. in Toronto’s entertainment district, David Mirvish and Frank Gehry propose a three-building residential and mixed-use complex including OCAD University’s “Princess of Wales Centre for Visual Arts,” as well as a new public art gallery. The new gallery will make available for the first time David Mirvish’s...