Because it’s that time of year, the Tribune asked four prominent Chicago architectural firms to design gingerbread houses, and tasked their edible construction to 312 Chicago pastry chef Kimberly Schwenke (a gingerbread construction pro, she’s built cookie versions of the entire block on which her restaurant sits, and this year is doing a scale model of Daley Plaza). Pictured above is our favorite, “A Convenient Roof” (zing!) designed by Douglas Farr of Farr Associates.
Farr took a certain amount of glee in providing Schwenke with structural challenges: “How do you do cantilevers in gingerbread?” It seems to have delighted Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin, who was very much taken with “the downspout made of wax candy sticks and filled with bluish wax candy representing water” and “the array of rooftop solar panels, made of sheet gelatin.”
