Gingerbread 2016

You wouldn’t think it, but one of the most hectic times of the year in our architecture firm is the annual Gingerbread display in December.  Started before my time here in 1987, the ‘Display’ as it is known has grown from a simple gingerbread house display on a countertop to an immersive, larger than life experience.  The original objective was to create a fun activity for our clients at our annual Holiday party held each year in the first week of December.  Every year we say it is too big and should be simplified, and every year it gets just as big, in one way or another.

A lot of people spent a lot of time on the display.

This year, the idea was to do a simple streetscape in the city, 3 story townhouses in an ‘L’ shape.  Sounds good, right?  Until the scale of the display doubles from 3/8” = 1’-0” to 3/4” where the size of a 6 foot tall person in the display grew from just over 2 inches to 4 1/2”.  For someone who makes a lot of the people for the display, this was a big deal.  Normally we can reuse a lot of the people from year to year.  A Santa from last year is just as good as a new Santa.  But not this year.  All the people to populate the display had to be made from scratch and twice as large.

The simplicity of the theme this year was diluted by the idea to include some “Underground” activities, even though these ideas were not really hashed out.  During the initial meetings, all that was discussed was a ‘Rat City”, which I thought was distinctly Un-Christmassy.  So when it came to sign up for Display entries, rather than doing a house I decided to work on the Underground, to make it more festive than a subterranean city of mutant rats.

I don’t know when exactly I got the idea, but I think I Googled something like “Santa on the Subway” and I came up with this picture:

The concept photo (credit:BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS)

One way to enliven the Underground was to fill it with dozens of Santas.  To be clear, the intent was to have a subway station stop with all the department store Santas getting off work and on their way home to their own families.  So I thought that several of us could work on doing a subway station, since that fit well with the Underground theme and as part of it, I could make a lot of the Santas to fill the platform. 

Along with one other co-worker and my two kids, we embarked on creating a Subway scene for the Display.

Step One:  Make Fondant Santas.

Step Two:  Make more Santas.

Starting the Subway car and platform.

The completed platform.

Santas headed home.  If you look really hard, you'll see Where's Waldo.

Simple, huh?

We thought this looked like the clock tower from Back to the Future, so we made Doc Brown & the DeLorean.

No Display is complete without a dragon!

The movie theater has a working tablet showing the Mickey Mouse movie on the inside.

There you have it, one simplified Display.  Hopefully next year we don't decide to simplify it too much more.  It'll be life sized.

If you're interested in the whole process of the Display, start to finish, I wrote a series of posts describing it starting here:  Gingerbread 2013: Part one

Gingerbread 2013 Part Five: Postpartum

Publicity and Dumpsters

From conception to birth, pardon the analogy, it was a journey of about three months.  Starting with our first organizational meeting in September to the Client party in December, to tear down the first weekend of January.  For an ephemeral display, that is a significant amount of time.  The display was officially "open" from December 11, 2013 and was set to be torn down on January 4, 2014 - just over three weeks from completion.  Many who tour the display ask what we do with it once the holidays are over.  Honestly, it is without much guilt that we respond like an umpire at home plate: "It's outta here!"

I imagine it is somewhat like the float builders in Mardi Gras or the Rose Bowl.  Granted this is a simplistic analogy, but we all go into it knowing that the creation will not be permanent.  Or, for the architecture nerds, Aldo Rossi's 1979-1981 Teatro del Mondo, which was built to float across the Adriatic and intended to be dismantled once it reached the other side.  But we still have our piece of Aldo in the china closet in that espresso maker that is too nice to muck up!

We labor on the display knowing full well that its destination will be in the dumpster in a few weeks' time.  But we labor none the less.  As Aldo so poetically put it (I paraphrase here):  the built environment provides a stage for life to occur.  Instead of icing and gingerbread, he used painted plywood and a zinc roof.

But until its demise, mileage, we shall get from it.  Immediately after the Client Party, the local news will come for a live look in on us (starting at 5 AM, lucky for the guy showing up for that!), and a couple of local publications will come to snap a few photos.  We also open it up the next three Thursday evenings to the public.  

And does the public come.  Thank goodness for the new office because we had over 200 people on the fist night, over 300 hundred on the second night and, on the last evening (the day after Christmas) we had almost 450 people.  They waited up to an hour and a half in line.  For some time, some had to wait outside.  We opened the doors to the public at 5 PM right after work and technically they were open until 7 PM (although we didn't turn any latecomers away).  Then it took almost 90 minutes for those last visitors to make it from the front door and out again.  Once a visitor got to the display, it would take between 10 and 15 minutes for those people to get the whole way around.

My apologist comment to the folks coming in was , "I sure hope it was worth the wait."  Most people, either sincere or very good fibbers, seemed to think that it was all worth it.  We used to allow people to come look at it whenever they came by during business hours, but it became so disruptive over the years, that we had to set something up outside the work day.  In three days this year, over 1,200 visitors.  

I think, and I mean this sincerely, that the mobile phone has exasperated the wait times in "modern" times.  People come in with Cellphones, iPhones or iPads and they begin to make a documentary of their visit.  I literally saw people trying to take detailed pictures with a flip phone this year.  And the whole selfie thing is, well, let's just say it held up the line far too much.  I hope someone proves me wrong and we end up in some HBO documentary or something, but I highly doubt it.  No one looks through their own eyes anymore, always filtered through a screen...

After that final public night, it is just a matter of time before we have to dismantle the display.  The first Saturday in January we will typically meet for a few hours, maybe ten or twelve of us.  It really only takes a few hours.  Mostly, there is a lot of banging, tearing and smashing, followed by a lot of vacuuming.  No craft here:

Actually there can be quite a bit of sawing and cutting, just being careful enough not to cut the lights and extension chords woven into the underbelly.  That icing gets really hard.

And just like that there are hundreds of man hours tossed in a cart, being hauled off the the dumpster.  I was able to pluck off several characters I had made out of fondant that will dry rock hard and can be used in the future perhaps.  I saved my kids gingerbread boats (for now).

While it looked pretty cool and might have been able to bust some ghosts, this backpack vacuum wasn't so good at pulling up candy from the carpet.

And this became the final resting place of the 2013 Gingerbread display.  So full the lid wouldn't shut.  In the old office there was a sense of relief to get our much needed table tops back.  This year the display didn't usurp any space that we desperately needed back, but it didn't really dampen our enthusiasm to remove it.  After seventeen of these, at least for me, it is just another stage in the development of the display.  Tear down.  Without it, we can't have another one next year.

Gingerbread 2013: Part Three

Why Do We Do This Every Year, Again?

Every year, there is a week long push to really get the display to come together.  Basically, groups of people start staying late in the evenings after work and all day on Saturday and Sunday.  (See football game on the wall in the background).  Usually, Monday and Tuesday are more or less touch-up and clean up.  The last couple days are when you see the opportunity for a few of the funny accessories.  They kind of happen once you see how everything lays out.

At a certain point, we need to start mass producing the little things that enliven the display.  This happens once most of the people are done with their houses.  People and animals make the scenes come to life.  Bikes, cars, trees and carts fill in the gaps.  In the photo above, there are tons of little things created to go "somewhere".  Birds come together with some Good & Plenty's and gum, Rabbits and dogs come from a bit of colored fondant.  Some things we kind of know where we want them to go, others are just for fill in.

The centerpiece of the display was a monastery.  So i figured it should have some monks.  Since they wear cloaks, they weren't too hard.  For some reason, I felt they should all have male patterned baldness, maybe a reflection of the maker?  And who else was in the news?

The Pope, of course.  This was Italy anyway.  And he was coincidentally named Time's person of the year about a week later.  His hat is a rigatoni.  He is in a Volkswagen, because I mistakenly thought lost so people would have heard this same joke I had.  Q:  "How do you fit the Pope in a Volkswagen?"  A:  "You take off his hat."  Well, I gave him a convertible, and I was really dead wrong about others having heard the joke.  NO ONE heard it before.

Eventually we get close to done.  We hung clouds, which looked great and were back lit.  Someone had the idea to make a moon, which led to someone making an astronaut standing on the moon, and someone gave the astronaut an RLPS flag, then I had the idea to make a man looking through a macaroni telescope on a rooftop.

There he is on that pink octagonal building.  There's even a bit of meaning behind that octagon, as it is one of RLPS' trademark visual elements we like to use in our projects.

All told we used 60 sheets of gingerbread, 30 gallons of icing, 80 pounds of candy. pasta, cereal and crackers.  All of this stuff had arrived only two weeks prior.  And it all leads up to the Client party on Wednesday night.  Oh yeah, that party is the entire reason we do this every year.  That is how it started and who we actually do it for.  I've been around for 17 of the 25 years it's been done.  My next post will finally address the finished results.  Tune in next time!

Gingerbread 2013: Part Two

Background Creation

 This year, in our new office the construction of the base was a bit different in that we had to start from scratch.  In our former office, we had two layout tables that served as the foundation of the base with some 2x6's spanning over top.  This year, Eric created a modular system of plywood covered tables that can be bolted together.  He built them all in his basement and they were assembled in the Great Room.

In usual fashion, we covered the plywood base with 2 inch rigid insulation to create the required topography of the island.  The entire perimeter would become the water's edge. The insulation eventually gets covered with icing or some other edible surface.

Since this display was to be a true island, a small trap door was devised to allow access to the very center so that people did not have to be suspended from the rafters, Mission Impossible style.  The trap door would eventually get covered, and a little insulation manhole cover was devised.  I am not sure why it kept getting set in place, because it kept getting stepped on.  I won't name any names, but the guy who wrote "This is really not a step" was the second guy to step through the manhole cover.

Above is the second of three successive manhole covers to top the trap door.  And below is what happens when a full sized man steps on it...

Along with all the base preparations come the background buildings.  These are typically done by the display group and many hands touch them in one way or another.  This year was to be a monastery and I worked on the cloister piece in the photo below.  I got some loose sketches from Brent the designer based on a photograph of a real monastery.  Then, much as in my real job, I have to take these sketches and make them work in real life.  This foam base will eventually be iced and covered in crushed peanuts.  The monastery structure was probably one of the best background buildings ever built, in my opinion.  And the scent of peanuts was so strong, we started to wonder if the scent alone could trigger anaphylactic shock in someone seriously allergic, that we put up a warning at the front door.

Ordinarily there is a subset of the group who has the reigns of the overall design concept for the background buildings.  We count on them to give enough direction to us worker bees to pump out the items that become the background.

One week before the Client Party, we have Family Night.  After work all the families that care to can come into the office and work on the various parts of the display, mostly the individual houses, but some of the group continue to work on the background.  Prior to the event, the entire floor was covered in the plastic sticky stuff you see in new houses or in renovations.  A lot of the houses are worked on by entire families, including spouses and children.  Other teams are composed of multiple staff members.  They are big undertakings, so the extra help is always worth it.  The office will order a dozen or two pizzas typically.

The week between Family night sees probably the most significant amount of work on the display during that time.  It is a bit ironic because after family night, our spouses don't see much of us until a week later.  My kids (8 and 10 at the time) LOVE helping, so they spend a lot of time with me after school and during the intermittent weekend helping out.  At this stage, they can actually contribute to the display on their own without my supervision and I can continue to work on what I need to work on.  Aside from one minor Xacto cut and several hot glue gun burns, they were fine.

The next post will address the final week and all the little details that really make the display shine.

Gingerbread 2013: Part One

Part One:  Concept

Our gingerbread display here at RLPS is legend.  I can say that because it has been going on for twenty-five years, annually since 1987.  Those of you quick in math may point out that this is a twenty-six year span. You'd be right.  But we did not do a display in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, the aftereffects of which had already been felt heavily on us and our Clients.  The decision was made to abstain that year.

That said, the gingerbread display originated as a fun activity for our Clients at our annual Christmas party, held at the beginning of each December on a Wednesday night.  Quickly, it snowballed into a larger than life display, garnering local news coverage and we eventually intuited public viewing options after hours because allowing the public in throughout the day became so disruptive, it was hard to get through our old design studio.  Busloads (literally) would show up in the middle of the day.

I say "old" design studio meaning we've moved our office in the last 12 months.  So this is our first display ever in our new digs.  As you might imagine, there was a good amount of thought as to where the display would go, and how people would get to it.  I must say, with a few exceptions (I will get to those later) the display went off very well.  The exceptions had nothing to do with the building design, but how the display was set up for circulation.

One of the questions we hear all the time is, "How do you come up with the ideas, year to year?"  This year, i tried to document this part of the process, as the actual making of the display and the finished product garner a lot of attention and photographs, this part is a little less exciting, but nonetheless an important part of the story.  Each year, we begin with some committee meetings and someone (usually a newer hire) is tapped to be the main organizer.  This is our kind of hazing; much more cruel than any other I've ever heard about even in the recent NFL allegations in Miami.  This person has to herd in dozens of people, organize volunteer work sessions, make sure food is there for the volunteers (ultimately important) and keep the schedule.

We start thinking about the theme in early Fall.  This year, a theme that has been knocking around for a few years became the predetermined theme.  This is unusual for us, as normally, the first meeting of the Committee is brainstorming ideas and coming up with a short list of ideas that are ultimately voted upon.  This year the underlying idea and even a concept plan was presented to the Committee on September 25, 2013 at a lunchtime meeting.  We had pizza for lunch...

Some planning went into the presentation ahead of time:

...and the idea was presented to the Committee.  Already ideas were in place as to how the houses would be placed on the site and in relation to the other houses:

Scale of the houses had to be decided.  3/8" = 1'-0" works well for us so the buildings aren't too big, nor are people in the setting too small to build.

This year we had three formal meetings.  The next meeting was about two weeks later.  This year, as we were in a new space, we had to build an entirely new base for the display.  We had used a pair of layout counters in the old office.  This year we were placing the display in a larger room with no fixed furnishing to work around. 

This allowed us to lower the display and there was no real constraint on front versus back.  As the them was to be an Italian hill town, we noodled on how best to represent this concept.  Speaking of noodles:

Noodles would take a prominent role in this display.

The last formal meeting took place in the first week of November.  We ate subs.  I will pick up the story in the next posting...