Our first design charette at the new Toronto office!
We’re thrilled to launch Parkin Studio’s inaugural charette in our newly purposed space in our new office, “Discovery District”—designed to spark creativity, collaboration, and bold ideas. This is more than just a design exercise; it’s a celebration of our new environment and an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of imagination and design thinking.
Using the collaborative energy of our new space, participants formed teams to explore the concept of the “modern city” through a lens of narrative, memory, and sensory experience.
Charette Summary
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this charette invited designers to reimagine how we perceive and describe the cities around us.
In Calvino’s novel, the explorer Marco Polo speaks of fantastical cities—some imagined, some real, all deeply personal. His stories are rooted in memory, sensation, and emotion—how a place feels rather than how it looks on a map.
Like Polo, we reflected on our own experiences with urban spaces. How do we move through them? What do we notice, feel, and remember? What stories do our cities tell us—and how do we tell those stories to others?
This creative exploration challenged us to think differently about design, walkability, storytelling, and the sensory elements of place.