Project
Reflect x Refract
Location
Toronto, Canada
Status
Completed
Winter Stations is an international design competition held in Toronto, Canada. The winds and snow, the vastness of Lake Ontario, and the shoreline against Toronto’s skyline have captured imaginations worldwide to explore new visions of art in public space. The lifeguard stands (dormant in winter) serve as visual anchor points for each installation. Every year, the exhibition draws thousands of visitors, bringing creativity, community, and colour to the city’s Woodbine and Kew beaches in the coldest months.
Team
Sameer, Madhavi
Have you ever seen your reflection bend, blur, and break into something entirely new?
This installation invites visitors into a shifting dialogue between solidity and illusion. Composed of three modular orange volumes, it reflects and refracts its surroundings; shoreline, snow, and sky; transforming stillness into movement. As mirrored planes distort perception, what feels near drifts away, and what appears solid dissolves into light. Inside, rippled glass fractures reflections into fleeting, dreamlike patterns that exist only in the viewer’s moment of presence.
The vivid orange structures ground these ephemeral visions, offering places to pause, sit, and observe the world as it folds and unfolds around them. Rooted in architectural logic yet reaching toward the poetic, this winterstation becomes a meditation on perception; a space where seeing becomes an act of creation, and every reflection invites the viewer to question what is real.