Winter Stations is coming back to Toronto and you'll be able to step inside a surreal cloud

One of the city's most creative traditions, the Winter Stations along Woodbine Beach, are coming back this winter, and they just dropped a preview of what Toronto residents can expect.

Back for a tenth year of transforming lifeguard towers along the city's east beaches, this year's event will feature six huts along Woodbine Beach and three more along Queen East (at Woodbine Park, Kew Gardens, and Ivan Forest Gardens).

Each year, four hut designs are chosen through a contest that collects submissions from worldwide designers, while three student projects are chosen from Toronto Metropolitan University, University of Waterloo, and University of Guelph. 

This year will also feature two hut designs from past years from the Winter Stations Archives — a tribute to the city's most famous dead raccoon and a colourful "delighthouse" accompanying the winning designs.

Making Waves by Adria Maynard and Purvangi Patel.

This year's submissions centre on the theme of "resonance," asking designers to challenge themselves to "breathe new life into the echoes of the past by recreating, reimagining and reinventing cherished installations from Winter Stations history," say event organizers.

"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."

The station is comprised of a series of moving parts that can be touched and worked with to cause movement in a different area of the station.

We Caught a UFO! by Xavier Madden and Katja Banovic.

Another station featured this year, "We Caught a UFO," embraces the theme of resonance by taking inspiration from one of last year's stations that created an elevated, treehouse-esque space, and interpreting 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 (which is made to look like it's being held in place by a net) and look out at the beach from a new perspective.

A KALEIDOSCOPIC ODYSSEY by Brander Architects Inc.

"A Kaleidoscopic Odyssey," by Toronto-based architecture firm Brander Architects Inc., asks you to view yourself from a different perspective by creating a walk-through station with refractive, angled mirrors that create a kaleidoscopic effect.

The Winter Stations are always a fantastic — and very Instagrammable — way to spend a weekend in the winter, so grab a coffee (I suggest Bud's) and get your art on.

Winter Stations opens on Family Day weekend until the end of March, and is completely free and open to the public.