We wanted this year's theme to look beyond the five senses to bring interactive art to the water's edge. Winter Stations has always been about bringing joy, warmth and conversation to the long, cold Canadian winter landscape.
– Roland Rom Colthoff

Installations inspired by the sun, a kaleidoscope and noodles have won Toronto's sixth annual Winter Stations design competition, via which the city's lifeguard stations are transformed into thought-provoking pieces of pop-up art.

Winter Stations was conceived by RAW Design, Ferris + Associates and Curio as a way to encourage Toronto residents and visitors to visit the city's beaches during the winter, to experience artworks and to make new connections with each other.

This year's theme, 'Beyond the Five Senses', asked designers "to explore how our senses interact and overlap to provide us with a picture of our environment and how we interact with it, demonstrating our subjective relationship to reality or displaying a distorted one."

Three winning designs were chosen from 273 submissions from around the world.

Mirage, by Cristina Vega and Pablo Losa Fontangordo, is a model that appears to be either a red setting sun or a bright rising sun depending on where the viewer is positioned as a result of the model's structure.

Kaleidoscope of the Senses, by SUHUHA's Charlie Sutherland, re-purposes an existing lifeguard chair to create a composition that creates clanking metal sounds in the wind, draws up the aromas of oils from the sand and provides a place to sit and view the surroundings.

And Noodle Feed, by iheartblob, mixes colourful, noodle-like forms to attract attention, materials with contrasting textures that can be rearranged and an augmented reality app that lets visitors leave digital traces of their time at the installation.

A local college has also designed an installation made up of stacked wooden rectangular prisms around a giant steel drum to form a large wind-chime.

Winter Stations co-founder Roland Rom Colthoff, of RAW Design, said: "We wanted this year's theme to look beyond the five senses to bring interactive art to the water's edge. Winter Stations has always been about bringing joy, warmth and conversation to the long, cold Canadian winter landscape."

The installations will be brought to life at Toronto's east beaches from 17 February 2020.

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