Humber College design students help celebrate a wintery beach

Humber College artists are once again participating in the 2019 Winter Stations in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. The International design competition was co-founded by RAW design, Curio, and Ferris+Associates. According to the competition’s website, the Winter Stations program aims to “bring temporary public art installations to The Beaches for an exhibition to celebrate Toronto’s winter waterfront landscape.” 

Currently in its fifth year, Winter Stations invites artists from around the world to submit designs that will be located at and incorporate life guard stations at Woodbine Beach.

Lisa Bradley, a Beaches resident, enjoys the art installations, “I come every year and it’s a new opportunity to learn something. It’s fun to see what people come up with.”

Each year, along with the selected winners, Winter Stations also invites various post-secondary institutions to submit proposals. This year marks the second time Humber College has been invited to participate.

“We have worked with Humber in the past, a couple years ago with Cole Swanson’s team and they did such a tremendous job we thought it be interesting to invite them again,” says Aaron Hendershott, architect at RAW Design and co-founder of the Winter Stations.

The team, led by Humber College faculty member Marcin Kędzior, is comprised of students from Humber College.

“This year they’ve put together a tremendous program, which is this multidisciplinary team from various different programs that collaborated on this submission,” says Hendershott.

Their installation “GROUND²”, follows this year’s theme of migration. According to the proposal, it is meant to represent “the near future of the world’s dissolving glacial Landscapes that will propel imminent environmental refugee crisis.” 

“GROUND²” features elevated structures that form a new ground between the boardwalk and Lake Ontario that will allow the public to walk and climb the new and “destabalized” path.

Hendershott praised the Humber “GROUND²” team. “I visited them early on when they were still developing concepts and I was really amazed at the quality and the diversity of ideas that were presented.”

“It was really interesting to see this collaborative process right from the beginning to finally seeing the students out there with pick-axes having to follow through on their design ideas and have to make this real,” he says. “The strongest aspect of the [college] involvement is that they have to design, fabricate, construct and install these things. A lot of time in design school you’re just dealing with concept but in this case they actually have to follow through.”

The Winter Stations will be up until April 1.