OCA Interior Design: Gingerbread City, London, December 2024

You might make and decorate a gingerbread house at Christmas time, but could you make a whole city?

Gingerbread City is an exhibition of just that—a city made from decorated gingerbread. It might seem irrelevant to those studying interior design and something more like a children’s holiday activity, but this gingerbread city is made by very experienced design professionals, and the annual competition is taken very seriously!

Since 2016, several of the most respected architects, engineers, and designers in the UK have put down their pens, given up AutoCAD, and instead turned to flour, sugar, eggs, and spices to create the spaces of their dreams. Some of the entries this year were from established architectural firms, including Sheppard Robson, Wilkinson Eyre, ZHA Zaha Hadid Architects, Studio Bark, and many others.

This annual event is hosted in London for a few weeks around the festive period but has also ‘gone global’ in the last couple of years with a gingerbread city popping up in New York too. The theme for the baking challenge changes each year, and for 2024 the focus was (very topically) Recycled City, where participants were encouraged to think about how existing buildings and places could be transformed into something new and exciting. Structures have included railway arches, disused factories, power stations, and even shipping containers… think of adaptive reuse, but made out of gingerbread, sweets, and lots and lots of icing!

It’s loads of fun and a great thing to visit around Christmas time if you get the chance next year, but there is a serious side to the exhibition too. It is run by the charity Museum of Architecture, whose fundamental mission is to find new and innovative ways for the general public, ordinary people, to engage with architecture and spatial design. They run other events and exhibitions too, and you can find out more about their work here.

Think about the materials that you might want to use next time you’re exploring physical model making in interior design. And also think about your audience and how they might read your design if it is made in an ‘alternative’ material. If you express your design in a fun way, does it make your idea easier for other people to understand?

I’m not suggesting that you make your next scale model from decorated gingerbread, but before you start, have a think about the many different ways that you can approach a spatial design challenge!

(All images by C Byrne 12/2024)