Interpretation, Studies & Strategies
Spotlight
Creemore Village Green
In the heart of the Village of Creemore, an underutilized park and adjacent building were transformed into a cultural landmark and vibrant green space. Initiated by a local advocacy group, ERA worked with them to reach their vision by shepherding a public consultation program, including extensive research, community engagement, and preliminary design work. Over two...
480 Yonge Street
The landmark Victorian-era clock tower located on Yonge Street, just north of College Street, has a multi-layered history that links many communities and generations. First built in 1872 as Toronto’s Fire Hall No.3, it was an impressive early punctuation on Yonge Street due to its imposing height and rich architectural detailing. By the 1950s the...
What lies beneath: Article series by Scott Weir
Toronto has a huge stock of Georgian, Victorian, and other heritage homes. It is not uncommon for these fine structures to have had many of their original qualities removed or obscured by generations of renovations and repairs. This series of National Post articles by ERA’s Scott Weir explores a number of ideas surrounding heritage homes,...
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...
Friends of Allan Gardens (FOAG)
Since its inception in 1858, Allan Gardens has been a distinctive part of Toronto, dedicated to offering a stimulating environment for the pleasure of Torontonians. Originating as a horticultural feature at the centre of William Allan’s Park Lot V, Allan Gardens has watched the city grow and evolve around it. ERA is pleased to be...
Culture of Outports
In 2010, ERA Architects founded the Culture of Outports program to address the challenges facing Newfoundland’s outport communities following the cod moratorium. The program proposed that understanding their unique history and character was essential to successfully planning and managing their future. The Culture of Outports program set out to undertake a design-build project in different...
Majumder Manor
The “Culture of Outports” project proposes that an understanding of the unique history and character of outport communities is essential in order to successfully plan and manage their future evolution, post fisheries. There are plenty of examples throughout the province to suggest that communities are in search of inventive ways to invent new industries and...
One Millionth Tower
The One Millionth Tower project is part of the remarkable HIGHRISE initiative, which is a collaboration between a group of local residents, ERA Architects, and the NFB working to re-imagine and explore the potential of North Etobicoke’s high-rise Kipling Towers. The National Film Board of Canada’s HIGHRISE project is a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project...
East Scarborough Storefront
This collaborative project empowered local Scarborough residents to transform previously under-utilized land into a dynamic campus of community spaces. The East Scarborough Storefront (ESS) is a community centre offering multiple supports and services to the diverse communities of East Scarborough. It was widely celebrated as a model for positive city-building in Toronto’s inner suburbs. In November...
Pan-Am Athletes’ Village
The 2015 Pan/ Parapan American Games took place in Toronto, and were used as a catalyst to help drive the development of Toronto’s waterfront lands. The West Don Lands were developed as the athletes village for the duration of the games, and for later use as a residential neighbourhood. ERA was retained to serve as...
Milton Heritage Properties Business Strategy
In May 2010, ERA Architects partnered with urbanMetrics to develop a business strategy for the Ruhl Farmstead and John Willmott Farmhouse, two mid-1800s properties located in Milton, Ontario, a town undergoing rapid change. The challenge in this project was to develop a conservation strategy of the site’s built and natural heritage while responding to Milton’s...
The Tower Renewal Project
Tower Renewal is a strategy for the revitalization of Canada’s aging postwar apartment neighbourhoods as part of achieving sustainable, equitable, and prosperous cities and regions. Supported by government policy and incentives, hundreds of thousands of units of apartment block housing were built in the postwar years throughout the country. Today, this housing accounts for the...
Cultural Mapping
Working with the City of Toronto and the Martin Prosperity Institute, ERA is developing a series of maps visualizing the creative economy in Toronto. These maps build on ERA’s previous work mapping cultural facilities, cultural corridors, the distribution of public and private institutions, and historic formal development in Toronto.
North York’s Modernist Architecture
From the late 1940s through to the 1980s, Toronto experienced an extremely high rate of growth and development. During this time, the former city of North York became richly populated with modern architecture — for example, York University campus, Spadina subway line facilities, and the Don Mills neighbourhood, to name just a few. In an...
