TORONTO — Three winning submissions have been selected for the sixth annual Winter Stations Design Competition which will transform lifeguard stations at Toronto’s east beaches into pop-up art starting Feb. 17.
The theme for the competition’s sixth anniversary is Beyond the Five Senses. Artists, architects and designers were asked to explore how the senses interact and overlap to provide a picture of the environment and how people interact with it, a release stated.
The winners were selected by this year’s Winter Stations design jury from 273 submissions from around the world. Each winning submission celebrates Toronto’s winter waterfront landscape and aims to draw people outside to interact with installations, the winter and each other, indicates a release. This year, the winning designs will be joined by an installation from Centennial College.
The competition, founded by RAW Design, Ferris + Associates, and Curio, was conceived as a way of using design to inspire Torontonians to visit the beach in the winter.
“We wanted this year’s theme to look beyond the five senses to bring interactive art to the water’s edge,” said Roland Rom Colthoff, RAW Design and Winter Stations co-founder, in the statement. “Winter Stations has always been about bringing joy, warmth and conversation to the long, cold Canadian winter landscape.”
The 2020 Winter Stations winners are:
Mirage, by Cristina Vega and Pablo Losa Fontangordo, has been designed to react to the movements of the sun and the people. Depending on where the visitors are positioned, they will see either a red transparent sun setting or a light and bright rising sun on the horizon. As they walk closer, they will discover the thin structure that makes these two simultaneous realities possible.
Kaleidoscope of the Senses, by Charlie Sutherland of SUHUHA, re-purposes the existing lifeguard chair. An open bell tower structure creates clanking metal sounds in the wind, while a diagonal black chimney draws up the aromas of oils set into the beach sand at its base. A horizontal white extrusion reflects the expansive horizon, framing a view of the water and back to the city. A lateral red beam establishes a tactile bench within the structure, the only point of physical contact with the observer.
Noodle Feed, by iheartblob, goes beyond physical senses and creates a shared augmented reality environment where people can interact in new ways and consider that the world is much more than we perceive. The colourful forms and tangible nature of the noodles are designed to attract attention. An augmented reality app lets visitors leave digital traces of their time at the installation.
The Beach’s Percussion Ensemble, by Centennial College, consists of three structures of varying sizes formed of a series of stacked wooden rectangular prisms laid out in a circular shape around a giant steel drum. Where the prisms overhang, metal bells of varying shapes and sizes will hang. The elements of the lake’s environment will release the bells’ sound like a wind chime. Visitors can use sticks chained to the structure to play along with the sounds. Graffiti artists will also be invited to tag the structure.
Leading up to the launch of Winter Stations, an installation entitled Loop launches Jan. 15 as part of a partnership between Winter Stations and the Waterfront BIA to continue to bring interactive public art to the waterfront during the winter months.
This is the second installation and will be at York Street Park until Feb. 9. Loop is a cross between a music box, a zoetrope and a railway handcar. The retro-futuristic machine, more than two metres in diameter, creates animated fairy tale loops, states the release, adding it activates when a group of people work a hand lever, revealing a lit-up image cylinder that creates the illusion of motion in the drawings.
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