Winter Stations 2024 launches winning stations at Woodbine Beach and Queen Street Satellite Locations

Winter Stations, launched by RAW Design, Ferris + Associates, and Curio in 2014 has launched the winning stations selected from hundreds of submissions.

This year, the theme for Winter Stations, which is back for its 10th year, is Resonance. As a result, designers were challenged to go on a journey to reinvent and reimagine cherished installations from Winter Stations history.

The selected winners saw their visions realized by the support of Anex Works, a Toronto-based fabrication group. The nine public art installations will be on display from now until the end of March and can be found at Woodbine Beach, Woodbine Park, Kew Gardens, and Ivan Forest Gardens.

The winning designs are being showcased alongside three student installations that were designed and built by the Toronto Metropolitan University, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Guelph, respectively. Two designs from the Winter Stations Archive are also on display.

“The launch of Winter Stations brought smiles to the hundreds of people, families, and dogs that came out to see this year’s exhibit. After ten years of consecutively bringing bright and bold art to Toronto’s public realm, the impact of Winter Stations resonates directly with our innate playful nature and we hope to continue this impact for the years to come,” said RAW Design architect Dakota Wares-Tani.

Plans are currently in development for more exhibits later in 2024, sponsored and hosted by Northcrest Developments.

This year’s competition was made possible by the support of RAW Design, Northcrest Developments, and the Beaches BIA along with CreateTO, Sali Tabacchi Branding & Design, Meevo Digital and Micro Pro Sienna.

The 2024 Winter Stations winners are:

We Caught A UFO! by Xavier Madden and Katja Banovic, Croatia and Australia

“We Caught a UFO!” builds upon the project “In the Belly of a Bear,” which used the lifeguard chair by lifting the public above ground into a cozy space, transporting them into a new world. This station reimagines these qualities by referencing the rumours and whispers of the many UFO sightings across Lake Ontario.

A KALEIDOSCOPIC ODYSSEY by Brander Architects Inc (Adam Brander, Nilesh P., Ingrid Garcia, Maryam Emadzadeh), Canada

A KALEIDOSCOPIC ODYSSEY invites viewers to step into an experience where they “challenge where reality ends and imagination begins.” Visitors are able to explore the limitless depths of perception with this adaptation of Kaleidoscope of the Senses, 2020.

Making Waves by Adria Maynard and Purvangi Patel, Canada

Making Waves is a whimsical piece of furniture that represents “the ways that simple actions can ripple outwards to ‘resonate’ across time and space, moving and impacting others in surprising ways.” The installation takes the form of an exaggerated couch and forms an unusual urban living room where neighbours can gather and sit by the water.

NIMBUS by David Stein, Canada

This station was inspired by the airy strands that make up the 2016 installation Floating Ropes. Nimbus’s playful shapes and colours evolve the concept and materials by adding  blue ropes hanging below a bubbly white structure. The station asks visitors to “consider the presence and absence of rain in our contemporary world by referencing both severe storms and flooding” as well as trends of lack of rain, drought, and desertification.

Bobbin’ by Max Perry, Jason Cai, Kenneth Siu, Simon Peiris, Yoon Hur, Angeline Reyes, Oluwatobiloba Babalola, Yiqing Liu, Kenyo Musa, Ali Hasan; University of Waterloo School of Architecture

Bobbin’ invites visitors to a place where moments and memories result in reflection. The seesaws draw from the playground-like Sling Swing and Lifeline projects and its form within the landscape reflects HotBox and Introspection. Each material has been sourced from previous student projects and salvaged materials from the community of Cambridge.

Nova by Jake Levy, Emily Lensin, Luca Castellan, and Nathaniel Barry; Toronto Metropolitan University – Department of Architectural Science

Nova is a star that has crashed on top of a lifeguard station and illuminates Woodbine Beach throughout the night. This station highlights TMU’s past decade of Winter Stations, inspired by the origami, materiality, and form of Snowcone, Lithoform, and S’Winter Station. Nova also introduces 3D printing, a textile canopy, and an elegant steel pipe connection to create a pavilion with “Resonance.”

WINTERACTION by University of Guelph – Department of Landscape Architecture (Afshin Ashari, Ali Ebadi, Jacob Farrish, Cameron Graham, Ngoc Huy Pham, Ramtin Shafaghati, Zackary Tammaro-Cater) and Ashari Architects (Amir Ashari, Sara Nazemi, Anahita Kazempour, Hakimeh Elahi, Yasaman Sirjani, Zahra Jafari)

WINTERACTION resonates with OneCanada and WE[AR] projects and is a dual installation in Iran and Canada that fosters solidarity and social interaction between the two nations. Visitors are invited on a journey through a labyrinth that appears when an AR app is activated on their phones, which symbolizes a challenging quest and leads from “confusion to enlightenment, to reach inner peace.”

The two stations set to make their return from the Winter Stations Archives are CONRAD by Novak Djogo and Daniel Joshua Vanderhorst, and Delighthouse by Nick Green and Greig Pirrie.

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