Hundreds of Toronto’s Designers Party at #RAWMATERIAL

What do you get when you combine 3,000 bricks, 550 wood studs, 60 sheets of plywood, 350 meters of architectural fabric, an eight foot tall glass structure, and hundreds of Toronto’s top designers? You get #RAWMATERIAL.

To comment on Toronto’s building boom, RAW Design’s theme for their annual party was #RAWMATERIAL. They broke it down to the basics; brick and mortar, glass, wood, metals, fabrics, and created interactive installations.

“In the design and builder community, we spend our days obsessing over how to manipulate these resources to create structures for our clients and the culture at large,” says Roland Rom Colthoff, Director of RAW. “We want to create an atmosphere where people will have the opportunity to play with these building blocks—let their imagination run wild like when they were kids.”

Oh, did we mention that this whole party was hosted in Locker 3202 at Planet Storage? RAW and a team of architects, designers, and builders worked around the clock for a week to construct a residential neighbourhood which was hanging from the ceiling of the 11,000 square foot locker! How cool is that? People walked through the hanging wood houses, mingled in the spiral wood structures, and got creative with neon markers on the glass, which had black light shining on it.

It was like RAW deconstructed one of their condos that they designed, bit by bit, and creatively cluttered it around the room. So, whenever the city gets all hyped about a new building in Toronto, take a minute to contemplate the thought, work, and creativity that goes into designing even the most simple structures. It will allow you to see Toronto and all other cities in a brand new light.