For a day or two in December, the architectural imagination migrates its medium, and the workaday tribulations of CAD, Revit and Grasshopper give way to the tactile, aromatic pleasures of cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. From Toronto’s KPMB to the Rockwell Group, Morris Adjmi and Robert A.M. Stern, designers across North America have embraced the romance of the season, bringing an exacting eye to the gingerbread architecture of gumdrops, frosting and candy canes.

Beyond the sheer novelty of seeing architectural icons and contemporary buildings in gingerbread form, the fusion of professional design culture and a popular holiday pastime also yields thought-provoking results. For instance, last year’s Gingerbread City exhibition in New York — featuring designs by the likes of Cooper Robertson and Arquitectonica — was organized around the theme of coastal resilience and rising sea levels, translating ambitious sustainable thinking into a readily digestible medium.

Here in Toronto, KMPB’s recent Gingerbread Build for the City — organized in support of Red Door Family Shelter — saw architects, designers and developers build landmarks worthy of the title of “8th Wonder of the World.” And while the submissions included takes on recent global marvels like The Shard and Marina Bay Sands, Stantec’s entry celebrated Ontario’s own Niagara Power Plant, elevating a familiar piece of civic infrastructure into an exalted new context. It beckons us to see it all with new eyes.

My favourite event is organized by the Toronto Society of Architects (TSA). Every December, the TSA’s Gingerbread City invites “makers and bakers” of all stripes to show off their creations, including a Kids’ Main Street workshop. While the children’s eclectic, tight-knit streetscapes imagine a storybook city, it is no coincidence that our aspirational main streets tend to be pedestrian-friendly havens, rather than sprawling, car-dominated thoroughfares. They might just have something to teach us.

In the main draw, the TSA’s 2024 Gingerbread City proves just as thought-provoking. This year’s eclectic entries range from cozy houses and winter wonderlands to takes on the CN tower, and even a deliciously detailed replica of Toronto’s Ace Hotel. The most surprising — and delightful — entires come from Michelle Chan and Joël León Danis. Chan offers a romantic, wintry cookie interpretation of downtown’s Woodsworth Housing Cooperative, while León Danis recreated the nearby 60 Richmond Co-op (designed by Teeple Architects) in edible, frosted form.

It might just be dessert, but there’s political and architectural meaning behind the molasses. When we build gingerbread houses, our creations evoke feelings of warmth, nostalgia, aspiration and idyll. Chan and León Danis have folded affordable multi-unit social housing — typologies long neglected and maligned in the North American imagination — into the romantic canon of gingerbread, farming these buildings with a new cultural context. These are homes worth celebrating, dreaming about and building much more of — in gingerbread and in brick.