Toronto: One of the city’s most creative traditions, reportedly the Winter Stations along Woodbine Beach, are coming back this winter.
Back for a tenth year of transforming lifeguard towers along the city’s east beaches, the city’s most creative traditions, the Winter Stations along Woodbine Beach this year will feature six huts along Woodbine Beach and three more along Queen East (at Woodbine Park, Kew Gardens, and Ivan Forest Gardens).
Four hut designs are chosen each year through a contest that collects submissions from worldwide designers, and three student projects are chosen from Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Waterloo, and University of Guelph.
As a tribute to the city’s most famous dead raccoon and a colourful “delighthouse” accompanying the winning designs, two hut designs have been chosen from past years from the Winter Stations Archives would also be featured this year.
“Making Waves,” a work by Canadian designers Adria Maynard and Purvangi Patel, for example, is described as a “whimsical piece of furniture that represents the ways that simple actions can ripple outwards to ‘resonate’ across time and space.”
Composed of a series of moving parts, the station can be touched and worked with to cause movement in a different area of the station.
Another station featured this year, “We Caught a UFO,” embracing the theme of resonance, is inspired by one of last year’s stations that created an elevated, treehouse-esque space, and interpreted it in an entirely new way by turning it into a UFO.
Visitors walking along the beach are encouraged to crawl inside of the UFO, being held in place by a net facilitating visitors to look out at the beach from a new perspective.
“A Kaleidoscopic Odyssey,” by Toronto-based architecture firm Brander Architects Inc., enables you to walk-through stations with refractive, angled mirrors that create a kaleidoscopic effect.
Opening on Family Day weekend until the end of March, Winter Stations are completely free and open to the public.
