#era architects

[keepingitneutral]

Pinea Suite, ERA architects,

Photography by Esteve Serra

[sustainableto]

Sky-o-Swale® + Storefront Sports Court Green Roof Shade Structure & MLSE /Jumpstart Play Area

The Sky-o-swale is a shade-water structure that filters rainwater through a green roof, into an underground cistern. The water is used to irrigate the Community R.O.S.E. (Roots Of Scarborough East) Garden. More than that, the Sky-o-swale is a shaded community gathering space—a stage for performances and seating for the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) /Jumpstart sports pad! It’s a wondrous structure, with a truly amazing “made in KGO” history. The Sky-o-swale originated as a creative response to a physical conundrum. Provided with funds to build a bio-swale by Live Green Toronto, local youth were disappointed to learn that the soil at The Storefront would not allow for the necessary water filtration. Undeterred, the youth and architect mentors from archiTEXT, SUSTAINABLE.TO and ERA Architects, came up with a creative solution: put the bio-swale on a shade structure “in the sky.” And with that, the idea for the Sky-o-swalewas born.

Location: Scarborough, ONCompletion: August, 2014Client: East Scarborough StorefrontDesign: KGO YouthCommunity Design Lead: archiTEXT Inc.Landscape: E.R.A. ArchitectsStructural: Blackwell Engineering & Tensile IntegrityContractor: Direct Construction Ltd.

[brandondonnelly]

Tower renewal

Before I went to bed last night, I stumbled upon this Globe and Mail article talking about Toronto's Tower Renewal program. Here's a snippet:

"In the postwar period, Canadian cities, particularly Toronto, grew differently from those in the United States, following a European-style model of regional planning. Regional governments insisted on building suburbs that were dense and housed people of all income levels. Apartment towers helped balance out the pricier single-family houses that middle-class people preferred – and a generation of new Canadians, and those migrating from rural Canada, arrived to fill those apartments. It was good planning on a massive scale, in line with the market."

If you know Toronto's urban landscape, you'll know that this is true. The city is dotted with suburban tower clusters, many of which were built in the 60s and 70s during our last high rise boom. But these towers have now aged and the Corbusier style "tower in the park" planning ideology has proven to be a failure.

The Tower Renewal program is designed to not only retrofit those buildings, but also reposition how those buildings fit in with the larger urban fabric. In most cases, that'll mean adding more density to the site and activating the street level through retail and other uses.

It's absolutely the right move. I think that suburban intensification is something we're going to have to do all across the board to correct some of the planning mistakes we've made in the past and to make our cities more livable.

But the real question in my mind is whether we can transform the way people think about high rise living.

If you take a look at the snippet I included above, what is basically being said is that we built towers for poor people and immigrants coming to Canada. We slapped a "park" on the end of the neighbourhood's name (Regent Park, Flemingdon Park, Thorncliffe Park, etc.) and thought we had created something really quite nice.

Some neighbourhoods, such as St. James Town, were initially intended to attract young and hip urbanites. But was it ever really the King West of its day? The middle class preferred single family houses and that's where they went, leaving the tower communities to those who had no other choice.

Today, many of these tower communities represent one of Toronto's 13 "priority neighbourhoods." These are neighbourhoods considered to be in social and economic need. Given this outcome, there's no shortage of people comparing our new high rise communities, such as CityPlace, to older ones such as St. James Town. Is history repeating itself?

But I think things are a bit different this time around. We're building more condos than rental apartments and we know that housing tenure can matter. There's been a return to cities. People genuinely like living in walkable communities close to amenities. The region is becoming increasingly harder to navigate by car. And the price of single family homes is no longer within the reach of many middle class families.

What all this mean is that I think Toronto is in the early stages of transitioning to a city where more and more people actually live and raise families in multi-family dwellings. I disagree with the notion that we're already there, because even though we have lots of high rises, they're often viewed as a stepping stone towards a more desirable form of housing.

The true test will be when this generation of condo dwellers grows up and decides to have a family. Will they stay put or once again search out the seemingly necessary single family home?

[retaildesignblog]

CINEMAS! Epicenter Cinema by Era Architects

[sustainableto]

Planting for an elevated bioswale in Scarborough

[onehundredyearsofmodernism]

Photograph of a Tower in North York, Toronto. ERA Architects.