Museum of Marshmallow

Kevin Kelly Architects are delighted to take part in the Gingerbread City exhibition by the Museum of Architecture. We were drawn to the brief for the Museum of Marshmallows as possibly the most unlikely building material.

Our design journey began by collating references that we associated with marshmallows. Fluffy pillows, clouds, bubbles and quilted blankets all provided influence for the primary design drivers.

An image of inhabitable meringues with stiff peaks floating above an undulating landscape of quilted marshmallows began to emerge.

Participating in the Christmas exhibition is an opportunity to learn some new baking skills but it is also an opportunity to explore some concepts emerging from other projects.

We have been exploring Voronoi logic and various different applications to organise geometry or components. Voronoi patterns can be found throughout nature and are commonly found in bubbles, or rather how bubbles organise themselves. We enjoyed the idea of creating a multi-coloured pastel bubble-scape made of marshmallows.

For the floating museum spaces above we created stiff hollow shells from sugar glass and sugar cane and dipped them in fondant icing. We wanted to retain a translucency for the lighting to shine through.