Profile
ERA Architects Inc., has been in practice since 1990 and is based in Toronto, Prince Edward County and Montréal. With over 40 staff members, the firm specializes in architecture, heritage conservation, landscape, urban design and cultural planning, and provides full professional services for both the public and private sectors. The principals of ERA are members of the Ontario Association of Architects and the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP), and Fellows of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Recent and ongoing architectural projects in building conservation and adaptive reuse in which ERA has been involved include Toronto’s Distillery District; Drake Hotel; Maple Leaf Gardens; Renaissance ROM; Transformation AGO; the Evergreen Brickworks; Union Station; the Artscape Wychwood Barns; Bridgepoint Health (the former Don Jail); Renwood Estate in Coburg, ON; and the updating of Heritage Conservation District Guidelines in Kingston.
Within our planning expertise we have a particular interest in regional and neighbourhood cultural planning; in cultural landscapes and their regeneration; and in facilitating community consultation of all stakeholders, as the democratic basis of good planning. Significant planning work includes the Union Station Heritage Precinct, Toronto Cultural Institutions Public Realm Study, numerous Heritage Conservation District Plans, and the Tower Neighbourhood Renewal Project in Toronto.
Our core interest is in connecting heritage to wider considerations of urban design and city building, and to a larger set of cultural values that provide perspective to our work at every scale. Our core values are in generating professional integrity and expertise through research, education and mentoring. To that end ERA frequently works collaboratively with other firms to engage in city building, conserving heritage architecture and improving the built environment. We also generate publications and exhibitions related to Toronto and to Canada’s built environment. The firm’s most recent book is Concrete Toronto, a guidebook to the city’s concrete architecture from the fifties to the seventies.