Stories

Passive House: A new way of working with existing buildings

by ERA Architects

Cities are at the forefront of climate change. In the fight for a low-carbon future, a new wave of building standards is changing how we think about energy-efficiency and environmentally friendly design. One of the top standards is Passive House. According to Passive House Canada, Passive House is regarded as the “most rigorous voluntary energy-based...

A screenshot taken ahead of a webinar, showing the panelists

ERA talks retrofitting towers (virtually)

by ERA Architects

Over the past few weeks, Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto have had the opportunity to participate in webinars to share more about ERA’s tower renewal projects. A large focus of these talks have been about our learnings surrounding the retrofitting of the Ken Soble Tower in Hamilton, which is slated to be one of the...

Celebrating ERA’s 30th anniversary

by ERA Architects

On May 1st, ERA is marking 30 years of heritage conservation, community building, and catalyzing change both in urban and rural settings. While we may not be able to celebrate together physically this year, we thought we’d take a virtual walk down memory lane to mark some of the themes behind our projects that have...

COVID-19 and ERA Architects: Our Work Plan

To our clients and colleagues during the COVID-19 pandemic

by ERA Architects

Dear Clients and Colleagues, Arising from the continued spread of COVID-19, the World Health Organization’s ‘global pandemic’ declaration, the State of Emergency called for the Province of Ontario and health emergency declaration by the Province of Québec, ERA Architects Inc has been working to adapt our work practices in order to help ‘flatten the curve’...

Senate of Canada Building receives international recognition with 2020 Civic Trust Award

by ERA Architects

The Senate of Canada Building has been awarded a 2020 Civic Trust Award, the longest-running international awards program recognizing outstanding architecture, planning and design in the built environment. The award was given to Public Services and Procurement Canada, Diamond Schmitt Architects and KWC Architects on Friday, March 6 in Manchester. The Senate of Canada Building...

Affordability and resiliency: Renewing Toronto’s towers

by ERA Architects

Photo courtesy Jesse Colin Jackson Over time, Canada’s aging mid-century towers have become the backbone of the country’s affordable rental supply, home to hundreds of thousands of low and middle-income households across the country. There are 2,000 postwar apartment towers located throughout Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe Region alone, representing nearly half of the region’s...

1953 aerial photograph from the City of Toronto Archives, annotated by ERA.

Alexis Cohen presents at the College Art Association (CAA)

by ERA Architects

Alexis Cohen presented at CAA’s 108th Annual Conference, held in Chicago February 12-15, 2020 as part of a panel exploring zoning in the histories of modern art and architecture. The panel was hosted by Christopher M. Ketcham and Deepa Ramaswamy. The CAA is the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts, and promotes these...

Residents and Small artists gather at the opening of Laskay's Gate

Celebrating Laskay through Memory’s Gate

by ERA Architects

Public art has the ability to represent and celebrate the identity of a place. As an architecture firm specializing in built heritage and cultural values, we are increasingly interested in how art and other placemaking interventions can not only represent unique histories but do so in a way that transforms underused spaces into thriving places...

The Ward Cabaret: The sound of Toronto’s first cross-cultural community

by ERA Architects

Cultural heritage is influenced and shaped by communities and their histories. In Toronto, this means much of the city’s cultural heritage is impacted by the multitudes of different communities that call it home. One theatrical production is giving this cultural heritage a sound. The Ward Cabaret is back in Toronto after a sold-out run at...

Ontario Place and the value of cultural heritage sites

by ERA Architects

Opened in 1971, Ontario Place was created to be a hub for Torontonians to experience the waterfront and take part in entertainment activities, from the open-air amphitheatre and the Cinesphere, the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre, to the Children’s Village play area and exhibit space. Ontario Place was the embodiment of the province’s economic and...

Building for the community, with the community

by ERA Architects

As an architecture firm with values rooted in how we collectively shape and build better cities and their spaces, it’s important to us to engage deeply with the community on our projects. While much of our work starts with assessments of existing buildings, observing their condition and advising site owners on how best to proceed...

Announcing Founding Principal Edwin Rowse’s retirement from ERA Architects Inc.

by ERA Architects

One of ERA’s two founding principals, Edwin Rowse, is retiring as of October 1. Edwin and Michael McClelland founded ERA in 1990 with a shared pragmatic, but principled, approach to heritage architecture, planning and conservation. Their ability to provide consistent advice from conception to full implementation of a project became a notable strength of the...

Uncovering the potential of Toronto’s laneways

by ERA Architects

Toronto’s laneways are having a moment. For decades, these alleyways were an underused, often neglected, space in a city in need of room to expand and grow. With Toronto City Council approving the adoption of laneway suites across the Toronto and East York district in July after a year-long pilot program, more attention is rightfully...

WexPOPS: Pop-up Plaza

by ERA Architects

WexPOPS is a pilot of the plazaPOPS project, an initiative spearheaded by Daniel Rotsztain, aka The Urban Geographer, and Brendan Stewart (OALA, CAHP), professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph, and former Associate at ERA Architects. In an interview supporting his recent book Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can help fight...

ERA Principal Graeme Stewart addresses a crowd in front of Ken Soble Tower alongside MP Adam Vaughan during the May 21, 2019 National Housing Strategy announcement.

Affordable, High Efficiency Tower Living

by ERA Architects

ERA is thrilled to be leading the rehabilitation of the Ken Soble Tower which will bring affordable housing options to the city of Hamilton as the first retrofit Passive House tower in Canada. The project recently received $10 million in federal funding which will help transform the tower and set the standard for industry-wide, ultra-low...

Accessibility & Heritage Conservation

by ERA Architects

How do we integrate universal accessibility with heritage conservation principles? ERA explored this topic in a two-day workshop at the Willowbank School in Niagara. ERA Associates Daniel Lewis and Douglas de Gannes worked with the second-year students to develop feasibility reports for two sites: The Laura Secord School and the Battle Ground Hotel Museum. The...

An Award-Winning Heritage Week

by ERA Architects

This past week, amidst annual #HeritageWeek events, ERA was proud to receive honours from both the City of Ottawa and the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Trust for four significant projects completed in 2018. On Tuesday, February 19, the Ottawa Heritage Awards were presented for “outstanding contributions to the restoration and conservation of Ottawa’s heritage...

New Approaches to Old Housing

by ERA Architects

For the past decade, Tower Renewal has been defined by research, policy design and action. Through multi-sectoral partnerships, best-practice and primary research, our work has evolved into program design, capacity building, and on-the-ground project implementation with a wide range of stakeholders. This ongoing program of ‘research to action’ was featured in Architectural Design Magazine special...

Tower Renewal Solutions on CBC Radio

by ERA Architects

As aging apartment buildings begin to contribute to the housing crisis, (exposed this week in the infrastructure failure at 260 Wellesley, Toronto) the clear response is system-scale reinvestment — and it’s underway right now across Canada. Of particular note, the Ken Soble Tower Project is one of the most significant and precedent-setting tower retrofit projects...

Immigration and Daily Life in the Ward

by ERA Architects

We are very excited to announce the latest installation of the ‘Armoury Street Dig’ series of exhibits at Toronto City Hall. Commemorating and interpreting the histories of St John’s Ward, one of Toronto’s first points of settlement for many newcomers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the exhibit “Immigration and Daily Life in the Ward: Addresses...

Heritage at Home

by ERA Architects

ERA Associate and Architectural Conservation Lead, Jan Kubanek, has managed and consulted on immense, complex projects like the Government Conference Centre in Ottawa and Toronto’s Union Station—and like so many other Canadians has also faced the unforeseen complexities of his own home renovation. It’s hard to find a more capable person to offer advice on...

ERA at Passive House Canada Conference

by ERA Architects

Last week, ERA’s Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto joined City Housing Hamilton CEO Tom Hunter to present on the Ken Soble Tower Transformation at Passive House Canada’s National Conference in Vancouver. The Ken Soble Tower Transformation project kicks off a groundbreaking program by CityHousing Hamilton to use the ultra-low energy Passive House standard for the...

Our Growing Leadership Team

by ERA Architects

As ERA continues to grow and evolve, the Executives and Associates are very pleased to welcome Sydney Martin to the leadership team as our newest Associate. Sydney has been with ERA for nearly a decade as a heritage conservation specialist whose expertise in architectural history, historic construction techniques and materials, and material repair has been...

Toronto Set in Stone

by ERA Architects

A guest article by Brendan Stewart—Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, University of Guelph Stone plays an outsized role in defining many of Toronto’s most beloved and well-used public spaces. Of course there is something singularly enchanting about the material itself, but as important is how it is arranged and put together — the artistry and craft...

From Past to Page: Uncovering the Ward

by ERA Architects

In 2015, ‘The Ward—The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood’ was published, documenting the area within Toronto known as St. John’s Ward (or simply “the Ward”), home to thousands of immigrants between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. With little of the neighbourhood’s physical fabric remaining, The Ward had largely faded from public consciousness,...