Stories

Meet the Directors: Dan Eylon

Dan Eylon discusses business integration and lenses on value

by Alessandro Tersigni , September 24, 2025

As director, I’ll be focusing on strategic planning and business integration. That involves knitting together operational aspects of our enterprise, from executive leadership down through the teams, and disseminating those ideas across the firm in cooperation with all our departments.

Meet the Principals: Shelley Ludman

Shelley Ludman discusses designing for continuity and change

by Alessandro Tersigni , September 17, 2025

I've always valued projects in which I get to work intimately with clients and communities to understand those significances. Supporting the evolution of spaces within living cultures is what’s made ERA such a great fit for me.

Meet the Principals: David Winterton

David Winterton discusses urban layers and heritage heterodoxy

by Alessandro Tersigni , September 12, 2025

What ERA offers is our ability to interpret those many formal and material registers and architectural codes, ascertain their value and meaning, share this with our clients and the broader public, and bring all of it together to reactivate old places and create meaningful new spaces for our contemporary world.

Meet the Principals: Samantha Irvine

Samantha Irvine on harmonizing conversations about the built environment

by Alessandro Tersigni , September 10, 2025

In an ideal world, great buildings are reused not because they must be, but because it makes sense from the perspective of the people who use them, the contribution they make to the public realm, in terms of good architecture, and the sustainability imperative they serve. When owners or users value a place and want to build on that value, that's when we do our best work.

ERA Architects Expands Leadership Team

by Julie Fish , September 8, 2025

ERA Architects is proud to announce the appointment of four long-standing team members to new leadership positions, recognizing their sustained contributions to the firm’s growth, culture, and impact.

Meet the Principals: Jan Kubanek

Jan Kubanek discusses conservation and public good

by Alessandro Tersigni , August 25, 2025

ERA isn’t a typical architecture firm. Collaboration is at the core of everything we do — we’re used to working closely with other architects and consultants to deliver our projects. We also take a more interdisciplinary approach than most, often getting involved in areas of a project that go well beyond standard architectural practice.

Meet the Principals: Philip Evans

Philip Evans discusses value and outcome in the built environment

by Alessandro Tersigni , August 15, 2025

I don’t think our profession has fully settled or articulated what it is yet. Heritage — as just one of many public benefits — is steadily broadening as a concept, and it remains incredibly difficult to define.

Meet the Principals: Graeme Stewart

Graeme Stewart discusses legacies and transformations

by Alessandro Tersigni , August 6, 2025

ERA is fundamentally grounded in place. We always start with something — whether a site, city block, community vision, landscape, or a set of ideas. We’re usually exploring particular ways of stewarding what exists and enabling some kind of thoughtful transformation. That’s been true since ERA was a firm of 12 people. In the early days, the question in Toronto’s collective consciousness was, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could imagine that something could transform?” Today, we take transformation as granted. The goal is to ensure it’s meaningful.

Meet the Principals: Victoria Angel

Victoria Angel discusses constructive debate and living heritage

by Alessandro Tersigni , July 31, 2025

I see ERA’s work as translating contemporary place-based theories and ideas into practice. We’ve tended to push the field of conservation by tackling complex problems and developing innovative strategies, approaches, and tools through those crucibles. One of the most interesting things about ERA is that we embrace the diversity of expertise and perspectives that exist across our studios. We have this incredible breadth of practice that fosters constructive debates and discussion.

Meet the Principals: Ya’el Santopinto 

Ya’el Santopinto discusses ERA’s radical practice

by Alessandro Tersigni , July 11, 2025

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.

Meet the Principals: Scott Weir

Scott Weir discusses ERA’s approach to renewing interesting places

by Alessandro Tersigni , June 26, 2025

There are all these architectural conversations out there, and our job is to be as open as possible and see where there are ways to draw out something new and complementary from what we've already got by telling a story.

Differing visions for a cultural heritage landscape

A hearing at the Ontario Land Tribunal considers a Niagara estate’s future

by Nigel Molaro , June 23, 2025

The Rand estate, known as Randwood, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, is a cultural heritage landscape that is noteworthy among Canada’s historic estates. The summer home of the Rand family for more than a century, it has faced an uncertain future since leaving the family’s care, and differing visions recently culminated in an extensive hearing before the Ontario Land Tribunal.

Meet the Principals: Andrew Pruss

Andrew Pruss discusses ERA’s collaborative lenses on change

by Alessandro Tersigni , June 20, 2025

ERA started small, but with a multidisciplinary approach. We’ve since grown to fulfil our aspiration and build our capacity so we can work with existing places at every stage and scale: pre-planning, policy, strategy, and implementation, not just with architecture but also landscapes and intangible management.

Meet the Principals: Michael McClelland

Michael McClelland discusses evolution and innovation at ERA

by Alessandro Tersigni , June 13, 2025

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...

ERA is honouring International Sculpture Day by putting the spotlight on two sculptures outside the Art Gallery of Ontario

by Michael McClelland , April 26, 2025

In honour of International Sculpture Day, ERA will be taking a look at the two sculptures currently situated at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO): Henry Moore’s Two Large Forms and Brian Jungen’s Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill.

Small but mighty! ERA’s Women-led Ottawa team

by ERA Architects , March 7, 2025

ERA is proud to celebrate International Women’s Day by spotlighting our "small-but-mighty" women-led Ottawa office.

Uncovering Toronto’s Lost Black Churches

by Michael Otchie , February 24, 2025

The Lost Black Churches research project is a collaboration between ERA’s Interpreting Slavery, Trauma, and Heritage Initiative and Camilla Hoang, an architecture student at the University of Toronto.

Reading and Writing Frank Darling: David Winterton on Toronto Edwardian  

by Alessandro Tersigni , February 17, 2025

ERA senior associate and architectural historian David Winterton recently completed the first-ever monograph on arguably the city’s most important architect: Frank Darling.

ERA is pleased to announce our 2025 staff promotions

by ERA Architects , February 7, 2025

As we enter another exciting year at ERA, we are pleased to announce our 2025 staff promotions.

Heritage Form and Contemporary Material at 2 Queen Street West

by Alessandro Tersigni , September 6, 2024

ERA Architects is thrilled to have worked with Zeidler Architecture on the recently completed reconstruction and restoration of 2 Queen Street West.     2 Queen was designed by Samuel Curry and Francis Baker for P. Jamieson Clothier Outfitter department store in 1895. In 1984 the building had its first round of heritage conservation work, due to...

Accessibility and heritage symbiosis: Q&A with architects Michael McClelland, Daniel Lewis, and Diana Roldan 

by Alessandro Tersigni , May 30, 2024

As a culmination of National Accessibility Week, ERA’s Alessandro Tersigni sat down with three of the firm’s architects specializing in accessible interventions in the built environment.   ERA principal Michael McClelland and architects Daniel Lewis and Diana Roldan discuss the different and changing meanings of “accessible”, the diversity of paths to achieving it, and the natural...

Storefronts and urban evolution: Q&A with Shannon Clayton 

by Alessandro Tersigni , February 29, 2024

This week ERA is exploring the history and design of storefront architecture. To understand the origins, evolution, and future of this iconic feature of commercial buildings, ERA writer-researcher Alessandro Tersigni sat down with Shannon Clayton, the firm’s resident storefront expert.   Shannon has worked on many conservation projects involving the design of new storefronts for commercial...

The Brig: A Reflection on Heritage Week 

by Michael McClelland , February 20, 2024

This Heritage Week, I’d like to remember the Brigadier, or the Brig, as he was known, for the lessons he taught me.    Brigadier General John McGinnis was a larger-than-life figure. He was among the troops that liberated the Netherlands during the Second World War, and then after retirement he began a second career in the then...

One Year of ‘The Signs That Define Toronto’ 

by Kurt Kraler , December 8, 2023

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the marquee in front of the iconic El Mocambo nightclub announced the momentous occasion; “The Signs That Define Toronto book launch”. Held on the evening of December 1, 2022, the event played host to an enthusiastic crowd of people who gathered to celebrate Toronto signs and...