Gingerbread Houses, Vancouver Style

This morn­ing, I heard an inter­view on the radio about a com­pany Cre­ative Room who, in coop­er­a­tion with Van­cou­ver Spe­cial is spon­sor­ing a char­ity auc­tion of non-traditional gin­ger­bread houses. To quote their web site:

Hid­den behind a thin veneer of jujubes and smar­ties, the ubiq­ui­tous form of the gin­ger­bread house has stood unchal­lenged for too long! The malig­nant plague of cookie-cutter hous­ing which fouls sub­ur­bia can­not be invited into our homes this hol­i­day sea­son. No longer rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our mod­ern lives, held in place by no more than icing and a repress­ing layer of nos­tal­gia, the con­ven­tional gin­ger­bread house must make way for the gin­ger­bread house of today!

Cre­ative Room and Van­cou­ver Spe­cial are chal­leng­ing Vancouver’s best archi­tects and design­ers to rethink the gin­ger­bread house in a form more fit­ting for our mod­ern life: to rein­ter­pret the gin­ger­bread house within a mod­ern context.

Houses are to be judged by a panel cho­sen from Vancouver’s pre-eminent archi­tects, design­ers, and artists. Entries will be made from edi­ble mate­ri­als, con­structed at a scale to fit within an 16” cube, and dis­played at Van­cou­ver Spe­cial. The win­ning entry will be feted loudly bring­ing (more) fame and for­tune to its illus­tri­ous design­ers. Entries will be auc­tioned off such that they may grace the liv­ing rooms of a select few Van­cou­ver homes this hol­i­day sea­son. All pro­ceeds from this event will be donated to Pivot Legal Society.

While I don’t have the funds or space to house such a beau­ti­ful and tasty cre­ation, I thought a few would be worth show­ing here. Go to the auc­tion if you want to see more pics of them. Some are pretty spec­tac­u­lar, like this mod­ern ‘laneway’ house (part of the Van­cou­ver den­si­fi­ca­tion plan), and a recre­ation of the Moon mono­lith scene from 2001 a Space Odyssey: