Libraries through the lens Gingerbread architecture
IN a festive change for this issue, photographer, librarian and now gingerbread artist Thomas Guignard takes us on a journey into edible libraries through the lens. He says: “The past few years, I’ve started adding culinary ambitions to my interest in library architecture. Each holiday season, I challenge myself with designing and building a gingerbread model of a library I visited for my photography proj- ect. This has led me to rediscover some of my favourite buildings in a brand new way and stretch the limits of my baking skills.
“I start each project with some re- search, finding blueprints and reference photos of all angles of the buildings I want to reproduce in gingerbread. These serve as a basis for the simplified roofs and facade shapes of my models. Pieces
December 2024
made of dough or molten sugar will have a certain thickness that need to be account- ed for, as well as that of the icing I’m using to fix pieces together. For more complex structures, I sometimes start with a cor- rugated cardboard scale model to help me visualise how pieces will come together. “Once I have my own set of gingerbread ‘blueprints’, it’s time to get baking. So far, I’ve worked with plain gingerbread for wall and roof pieces (a recipe chosen for its structural integrity rather than its taste, to the chagrin of my family), glass candy for windows, tuile for translucent walls and royal icing for sticking every- thing together. I try not to use too many ready-made elements in my designs, though I’ve found pretzel sticks to make great support beams.
“I’ve recreated three of my favourite libraries in gingerbread: Bibliothèque
Monique Corriveau (see the December 2021 edition of Information Profes sional), the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University and the Halifax Central Library. I haven’t yet decided what this year’s library will be, but with the holi- days soon upon us, I’ll need to get started very soon!
“Of course, there are many much more talented gingerbread architects out there, and I regularly look for inspiration from their creations. I’d love to hear from readers if they too have dabbled in recre- ating their library in gingerbread. And if not, maybe this will inspire them to try, as it not only a lot of fun, but also one of the few craft projects where mistakes are actually delicious!”
Find out more about Thomas’s ginger- bread creations at
https://timtom.ch/2023/11/26/ gingerbread-architecture/.
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