I have sweet spot in my heart for old blueprints and plans. Over the last decade I count myself lucky to have worked with the landscapes of and acquire copies of some great architectural homes.
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| Gorgeous plans... check out the hand drawn "swimming pool" label! What an awesome font! |
My favorite plans in my possession are by Hal Levitt (a gorgeous home in Rancho Mirage) and William Cody's Cannon House in Indian Wells.
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| The pieces before they were baked |
This year I thought it might be fun to make a gingerbread house Bill Cody's plans. I traced the floor plan at 1/8" scale which gave me the dimensions of the walls. Then reviewing the elevations, I extruded those planes. I used the trace pape, like a sewing pattern, and made the wall pieces. Then assigned a code to each wall according to it's relative volume and cut the gingerbread accordingly. The roof pieces were easy to follow on the "roof" plan.
Oh boy... it started out easy but the final execution was harder than I expected. First, the pieces all rose and bubbled up during baking and their "flatness" was lost.
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| after baking |
After cooling, I pieced it together, and realized the vertical scale was drastically exaggerated now due to the icing depth and the thickness from the gingerbread. Still, I was only slightly disappointed at this point, my real let down came next.
While decorating, I felt deeper disgust with every piece I tacked on. All the candy, gum drops, licorice, etc, was ruining the appeal and essence of the architecture. I had to stop!
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| the final product |
Lesson learned: Now, I fully understand why Victorian houses refer to their decorations as "gingerbread". Victorian style homes can wear the gobble-dy-gook (for lack of better description) with style.
A Modern home, however, is an arrangement of simple forms and volumes, usually linear in emphasis and void of excessive decoration. Translation: A modern gingerbread house is an oxymoron.
... the Gingerbread houses of the holidays are by nature full of decoration and whimsy.
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| I couldn't have the holiday without a proper looking gingerbread house... here's our traditional one. |
