Our team of gingerbread bakers and sugar crafters have been busy designing, baking, testing and building our creation for the Gingerbread City 2021 exhibition.
This year’s city is built across five different environmental zones: forest and the green belt; forgotten spaces/city pollinators; urban farming; wilder urban riverbank and suburban riverbanks and flood plain.
The Penoyre & Prasad team have converted an abandoned car factory on the edge of Gingerbread City into the ‘Fungi Farm Factory’ — a vibrant working hub for the local Gingerbread community — for food, this time around, instead of cars.
Assembly lines of old have been re-purposed for waste reuse and renewal; the linear methods of manufacture have become cyclical sustainable systems, each one feeding another. Green waste from the city becomes the growing medium for the plants that will feed the Gingerbread community.
Plants thrive in the rooftop allotments, vertical gardening maximises the use of space, and mushrooms are cultivated within the darker depths of the building — every opportunity is used as vehicles for growth.
The narrative of the factory is to feed consumption, but what if our factories could show us how to consume in a more ethical way? The Fungi Farm Factory allows us to see the circular economy in action.
The Gingerbread City exhibition is on display from 4 December 2021—9 January 2022 at 6-7 Motcomb Street, Belgravia, London, and is brought to you by The Museum of Architecture — a charity dedicated to finding new ways for the public to engage with architecture and to encouraging entrepreneurship within architectural practice in order to stimulate learning, collaboration and action.