Rendering of back garden, Ken Soble Tower retrofit. ERA is retrofitting the Hamilton tower to meet Passive House standards. Image courtesy ERA
TEXT Ya?el Santopinto and Graeme Stewart, ERA Architects / The Tower Renewal Partnership
As Canada sets out on the path toward COVID-19 recovery, retrofits of affordable tower apartments should be at the top of the stimulus priority list. Maintaining and enhancing towers improves health outcomes, housing security and climate resilience?all while accelerating retrofit market growth and providing green jobs.
Canada?s affordable apartment towers are the backbone of its purpose-built rental housing system, representing more than half of all high-rise units in the nation. Legacies of the post-war apartment housing boom of the 1960s and 70s, many of these buildings are now a half-century old and in need of critical repair. Months of sheltering in place due to COVID-19 have underscored the inequities of the housing system, and the acute challenges in upgrading this stock are more visible than ever. ERA Architects is one of the founders of a research collaborative?the Tower Renewal Partnership?that seeks to transform aging apartment housing into healthy homes for the 21st century. When it was conceived over a decade ago, the initiative was motivated by the social impact of community investments and the environmental impact of GHG emissions reduction. That focus gradually shifted toward a healthy-housing-first approach, as we began to see m...