A Parkdale collective of interior designers is not only holding workshops to train members of Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (PARC) how to refurbish and remake found furnishings to furnish the future Edmond Place, but they are recruiting local designers to do the same.According to the members of Public Displays of Affection (PDA), design should be available for everyone and that is exemplified in their latest project to furnish Edmond Place with one of a kind pieces made by PARC members and by well known interior designers and artist.

“We believe that anyone can be a designer,” said PDA member Jeremy Vandermeij. “There are different levels of education, but it is not a black and white thing where I am allowed to call myself a designer and you are not.”

PDA is a collective of four Parkdale residents who came together this past February. Parimal Gosai, Vandermeij and Katherine Ngui met while studying interior design at Ryerson University.

“After school we were all sort of ho-humming about what we wanted to do and we really didn’t like our jobs,” Gosai said. “We started this design collective called This Is The Best Thing.”

After a few projects they hooked up with Adam Harris and PDA was born.

“We just had this idea that we wanted to do a workshop in the community where we took found objects, basically garbage, off the street and we trained people how to make things that were desirable,” Vandermeij said. “Like we had been doing in our own homes.

“We knew that we wanted to work with a marginalized community and we knew that we wanted to do these workshops,” Vandermeij said. “In our minds, when we planned this, we wanted to connect designers and design with communities who didn’t have access to them.”

At that point the group met Victor Willis, the executive director of PARC.

Willis was not only interested in the idea of running workshops with members of PARC, but encouraged them to make a proposal to the building committee for Edmond Place – 29 self-contained units of affordable housing being built by PARC at 194 Dowling Ave.

“At that time we had the lofty notion of doing the entire 30 suites as well as the amenity spaces,” Vandermeij said. “At the beginning our plan was to furnish everything through these workshops.”

That has since been scaled back. He said they are learning as they go and furniture was not being produced at the rate they had expected.

“The first few weeks we were really just planning and figuring out how this could work,” Gosai said. “These are two very different worlds coming together.”

They adjusted their approach and now have a regular weekly workshop on Friday afternoons at PARC.

The workspace is limited, but they are making due with what they have for now. The workshop participants are mainly working on dinning chairs.

But, having realized they weren’t going to be able to produce all of the furniture needs for Edmond Place through these workshops PDA enlisted the help of Toronto designers to produce individual pieces for the amenity spaces.

So far they have enlisted the help of well known designers MADE, Christina Zeidler, Dennis Lin and DB Johnson.

Next summer all the work these designers are producing, as well as the pieces being produced in the workshop will be the subject of an exhibition.

The Deleon White Gallery has donated their space for the exhibition, which will run from June 21 to July 18, 2017.

It will then go to furnish Edmond Place, which is expected to open December 2017. But, beyond that, PDA hopes to open a storefront workshop with a wood shop in Parkdale where anyone can drop in and learn to refurbish furniture.

“That would be an ideal situation where everybody in the community could be in one space and it would create tolerance and acceptance of different people in the community,” Vandermeij said.

Then the men said they would like to apply the model developed at Edmond Place to other communities.

Source : www.insidetoronto.com