Much of the mythology surrounding Toronto is focused on a “city of neighbourhoods”, yet what is of equal interest is the completeness with which it accepted the modern project prior to this point.

Co-Published by ERA Architects and Coach House Books, Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies, examines Toronto’s remarkable collection of modern concrete heritage: Toronto is a concrete city. International landmarks, civic buildings, cultural institutions, metropolitan infrastructure and housing from high-rise to the single-family home: much of Toronto was born of an era of exposed concrete design. Under appreciated and misunderstood, Toronto’s concrete architecture represents an exciting era of cultural investment, city building, and design innovation.…

As part of this year’s North York Modernist Architecture Forum, ERA Architects released the 2010 edition of North York’s Modernist Architecture Revisited. The booklet includes new photographs of the over 200 buildings showcased in the original inventory, plus additional notable buildings built between 1945 and 1981 in North York. Included are many of North York’s finest examples of modern tower housing.  Also included is a proposed heritage policy strategy, biographies of several prominent architects, and an essay on North York’s…

George took me on as a mentee and agreed with my premise — that Toronto’s “edge cities” and modern apartment neighbourhoods were foundational to the contemporary city’s identity and conspicuously missing from current understandings of Toronto’s past (and its future potential). from Graeme Stewart’s feature “George Baird and the Toronto School” After the passing of George Baird in October, ERA principal Graeme Stewart reflected in Azure Magazine on his relationship with the architectural theorist and educator and the great value of engaging with…

Calling All Architects: New Approaches to Old Housing 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 issue: Calling All Architects: New Approaches to Old Housing. The issue showcases international leaders in rethinking…

  Postwar apartment towers are the backbone of Canada’s purpose-built rental stock, and provide affordable housing to millions of Canadians. Our recent map, accessed here, showcases the extent of towers across the nation. As Canada faces a growing housing affordability crisis, now is the time for coordinated action to build a future around more complete, resilient, and affordable cities. Tower Renewal is a strategy for realizing this change. The Tower Renewal Action Forum took place on October 5, 2017 at the…

UPDATE Check out “A New Era of Public Housing” with Paul Karakusevic available below or on the Daniels Faculty’s Youtube Channel.     ERA Architects, the Centre for Urban Growth + Renewal and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design are pleased to present architect Paul Karakusevic of Karakusevic Carson Architects at the University of Toronto. Please join us Monday October 2nd for Paul’s lecture A New Era of Public Housing, focusing on more than a decade redefining social housing in the UK. Paul’s…

On Wednesday, July 19th, leaders in the development of Toronto’s Residential Apartment Commercial (RAC) Zoning by-law gathered at York University to celebrate and explore challenges and next steps in empowering communities to utilize Toronto’s newest zone. The esteemed panel had representation from property owners, entrepreneurs, community members, academics and city builders with Graeme Stewart, Principal at ERA Architect and the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal as the Panel Moderator. Panelists included:      Michael Mizzi Director, Zoning and Secretary-Treasurer Committee of…

How can postwar tower neighbourhoods, built 50 years ago, transition into more ecologically- and socially-sustainable places? As we look ahead to the next 50 years, how can we plan for more resilient relationships in the between our city and its remarkable ravine network? In May 2017, the Ontario Climate Consortium (including Toronto and Region Conservation and York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies), the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Parallel 52, and the Centre…

2022 06 23 – MIT Technology Review: The future of urban housing 2022 06 01 – Architectural Record: Housing and Climate 2022 05 17 – Lessons from Grenfell 2022 04 22 – Metropolis Magazine 2022 04 07 – Ken Soble Tower becomes world’s largest residential Passive House retrofit 2021 10 21 – Tall Stories 276: Ken Soble Tower: Monocle Radio – The Urbanist 2021 10 01 – Ken Soble Tower Raising the Bar – Canadian Architect 2021 09 29 – Hamilton’s…

View videos, CUG+R TALKS, the  GALLERY and NEWS sections for more content.     Pechakucha: Tower Renewal 101 A crash course in Tower Renewal by Graeme Stewart.                     Tower, Slab, Superblock: Social Housing Legacies and Futures A conference hosted by the Architectural League of New York that examined the history, current status, and prospects of high-rise and superblock residential development. Experts discussed the potential for redevelopment from design and public policy perspectives. The Life- Sized…

Harlyn Thompson Lecture Series – Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba Thursday, March 16, 2017 6PM Lecture Eckhardt Gramatte Hall University of Winnipeg Speakers: Sabina Ali – Chair, Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee Graeme Stewart – Principal, ERA Architects, Co-Founder/Board Member, Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) and Co-Editor, Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies Graeme Stewart and Sabina Ali will introduce the case of Toronto’s built legacy: upwards of 2,000 modernist tower blocks that define its urban…

  “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform and reuse!” – Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal On December 10th a group of international guests will assemble at the Cooper Union Rose Auditorium in New York City to share thoughts on policy and design improvements to enhance the existing stock of postwar social hosing in North America and Europe, reflecting on the need for creating solutions to reimaging this housing stock. Hosted by the Architecture League of New York, the…

  “A new platform by which designers of these two great cities may share innovations and best practices with the common goal of enhancing the build environment.”- Mary Rusz This September, at the invitation of the AIA New York Housing and Planning and Urban Design Committees, ERA’s Michael McClelland, Graeme Stewart and Ya’el Santopinto participated in a panel in New York on Toronto’s modern heritage and Tower Renewal. The panel discussion took place at the Centre for Architecture in as…

A varied perspective of the global phenomenon of post-war mass housing through the lens of ‘documentation’ and ‘conservation’. Articles explore the tower block legacies of France, Russia, Brazil, Singapore, as well as Toronto.

The volume includes articles by Graeme Stewart focused on examining the state of concrete tower blocks internationally and exploring their potential architectural and urban futures in the Toronto context.

Congratulations to the team at Highrise for releasing a new and final chapter of their award winning web documentary. Highrise is a multi-year documentary project focusing on the suburban Towers of Toronto and nine other cities around the globe. The latest installment, Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise, serves as an interactive narrative revealing the digital human condition of vertical citizens globally. The documentary asks, “trapped in our highrise units, can we find love, hate, peace, god, community—or a better world—online?”   ERA…

ERA’s Graeme Stewart is pleased to be participating in the Active Neighbourhoods Canada project taking place in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park, Wed., March 25. The project uses participatory planning to help communities across Canada create green, active and healthy neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods celebrate the active use of shared public space; they support walking and cycling for everyone through safe and welcoming urban design based on the community’s vision.

  ERA’s Graeme Stewart is participating in the weekend symposium “After Empirical Urbanism” at U of T, Friday Feb. 27 to Sunday Mar. 1.

Image courtesy of Architecture for Humanity Toronto   Recently Architecture for Humanity and Ryerson University hosted a charrette to explore opportunities for Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood in light of the newly developed RAC Zone. Kicking off the event was a presentation by Filipe Balestra of Urban Nouveau, who discussed his work in “Incremental Housing Strategy” in India, Brazil, Portugal, and Stockholm, as well as the approach’s applicability to Toronto’s Towers. For the rest of the day, Filipe, ERA’s Graeme Stewart, and Elise Hug from the City…

Image: Toronto Star Throughout the first part of 2014, the Toronto Star is running a series called “Big Ideas“,  asking Torontonians to think big about the future of the region. What type of Toronto do we want to create in the years to come? For our contribution to this series, we discuss Tower Renewal as the key to realizing the region’s potential. The piece can be found at Here at thestar.com, or below:   The GTA can evolve into a…

Alex Bozikovic, Toronto-based writer on architecture and design, recently provided an update on Tower Renewal efforts in the GTA. The article describes the uniquely Canadian and Torontonian inventory of high-rise post-war tower apartment neighbourhoods, and recent efforts by local architects, not-for-profits, and city departments to rethink these neighbourhoods. With aging buildings in need of maintenance and energy efficiency upgrades, and zoning laws that see neighbourhoods underserved and undernourished, Toronto is ready for some practical changes. Bozikovic is optimistic: By his…

  Over the past couple of years, ERA has been working with The East Scarborough Storefront (ESS) on the Community Design Initiative (CDI), where Scarborough youth are educated in architecture and design by mentors from ERA, Sustainable.TO, and ArchiTEXT. In the current phase, we are working to bring more shade and plant life to the site. This will include several garden and landscape features, a pergola structure for grapevines, and a green-roof pavilion known as the Sky-o-swale. Beginning earlier in July, five youth from…

In May 2012, ERA hosted Miles Glendinning of the University of Edinburgh for a research tour of Toronto’s modern tower blocks and a public lecture at the Arts and Letters Club entitled “Hundred Year’s War: A Century of Mass Housing ‘Campaigns’ Around the World.” Miles is director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and chair of Docomomo International Committee on Urbanism. He is the author of several books including Architecture’s Evil Empire (Reaktion, 2010), a concise history of modern…

The book Concrete Ideas: Material to Shape a City was launched in January, 2012. Edited by Pina Petricone, the book considers new approaches to concrete architecture by exploring a variety of new technologies and possibilities for the material. First introduced by Pina’s article in Concrete Toronto, the book is a compilation of ideas, articles and interviews assembled over the past several years. The volume includes exploratory design work by ERA’s Jessie Grebenc, as well as a pair of articles by…

  The Toronto Standard discusses North York’s emergence as a ‘modernist heritage hub.’ To view the full article click here. Take a look at our previous post + full publication of ‘North York’s Modernist Architecture Revisited’ by ERA here.

This Option Studio focused on a site at Sheppard and Don Mills, typical of Toronto’s inner suburbs, with its distinctive clusters of high-rise residential buildings erected in the period of the 1950’s through the 1970’s. The goal of this studio was to investigate the potential of apartment tower sites to emerge as more liveable and sustainable communities, with a specific emphasis on built form. For more information on the site please see our previous post on the studio. The studio…

In fall 2010, Dean Emeritus George Baird and Graeme Stewart of ERA, conducted an architectural design studio at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, exploring the potential for mixed-use growth in one of the Toronto’s Region’s many post-war Apartment Neighbourhoods. The studio focused on one of the largest opportunities of Tower Neighbourhood Renewal: mixed-use growth within a large cluster of existing post-war Apartment Towers.   The site chosen was the North East corner of Sheppard and Don Mills…

  This past spring, the Design Exchange hosted Carrot City; an exhibition examining the potentials of achieving future food security, sustainable food networks and engaged communities through urban agriculture. Tower Renewal participated in this project, contributing research related to the potential for urban agriculture within Toronto’s post-war tower block communities. The following is a review of the exhibition by Canadian Architect:

“..In Toronto…the continent’s private enterprise-dominated housing system, when coupled with a structure of strong regional planning  dedicated to the fostering of high-density ‘hot spots’ in the centre and periphery, succeeded in generating a landscape of massed towers and slabs in open space, almost rivaling the USSR in consistency and grandeur ”._ Miles Glendinning Introduction to the Docomomo Journal 39 The Docomomo Journal’s 39th issue is dedicated to post-war mass housing. From the Docomomo lens of ‘documentation’ and ‘conservation’, the issue…

Cenceptual framework of basic high-rise over-cladding strategy With much of this high-rise housing stock now passing some 40 years of service, deterioration of the building envelope is widely evident as is these building’s increasing environmental impact on the region. Leaky sieves which pre-date building science, they require far more energy than necessary. It is time building performance was upgraded to the expectation’s of the 21st Century. The single most effective strategy in reducing the ecological footprint of our stock of…