![]() RAW (together with public art consultants Curio and landscape architects Ferris and Associates) took five lifeguard stations that dot the beach as their starting points and launched an international design competition. RAW Design is hoping to warm up frosty Toronto with a project, Winter Stations, which opens next month and promises to animate the beaches along Lake Ontario east of the city’s downtown. Parks and public spaces are often more inviting in the warmer months. ![]() : Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto in winter. It’s a remarkable blind spot for a people whose national identity is so bound up with the north. “A lot of the design approaches were to take you away from the weather and to protect you from it,” Holdsworth says. Those elevated walkways that connect buildings in downtown Edmonton, like the Plus 15 system in Calgary, are emblematic of the way architecture and planning in the 20th century tried to approach nature: by closing it off and securing everyone in climate-controlled comfort (think parking garages). ![]() For Canadians, not just Edmontonians, the approach has been to hide inside and use things like pedways.” The biggest obstacle, Holdsworth says, “is attitude. For local businesses, that would mean more patrons for citizens it would mean a better quality of life than one can get snuggling inside under a blanket. But the more immediate, and arguably more slippery, problem is to make people love winter. As Holdsworth explains, Edmonton is trying to change the physical design of its streets and public spaces through new guidelines (see sidebar). But the WinterCity strategy aims to take the perceived challenge of the city’s climate and make it into an asset. In truth, she says, it’s not that bad (Edmonton is relatively sunny and dry humidity has an important impact on how we perceive cold). “Over and over, I was told how horrible winter was,” she recalls. When she moved from Toronto to Edmonton, people warned her about the weather in a city where the cold lasts 150 days. It’s Susan Holdsworth’s job as Edmonton’s WinterCity co-ordinator to persuade her neighbours to get out in the cold, a process she understands requires a change in viewpoint. In Edmonton, a conference this week will bring civic leaders, activists and planners to share ideas and wisdom on building winter cities. “It’s full of people at all times,” he says, “even on the really cold days.”Ĭapturing that effect (and the sophisticated year-round design of the Quartier) is a goal for urbanists across Canada. Toronto architect Roland Rom Colthoff, who leads RAW Design, found himself inspired by the sight. ![]() The project, designed in collaboration with Atomic3, Jean-François Piché and Dix au carré, has had the desired effect. They’re set on rotating bases so visitors can spin them around, sending rainbows across the Place des Festivals, and are accompanied by ambient sound effects. The latter fills the plaza with 50 “prisms” – translucent columns lit from within and coated with a special film that refracts light in a changeable manner, emitting a constantly shifting array of colours as you move past them. The annual Luminothérapie exhibition of interactive art livens up Montreal’s cultural district.
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