Ginger Kondu

From the department of mutated and possibly retarded new Christmas traditions, meet the Ginger Kondu.

The Ginger Kondu may look like an ordinary gingerbread house (or more accurately, a Pepperskak Has, as it is called in that Scandinavian language they use on food products from Ikea) but our unique approach incorporated some distinctly Turkish architectural elements.

Just like manky street cats and Himalayan piles of trash, the "Gecekondu" or  squatters' house, is one of Istanbul's defining visual characteristics. "Gece" means night and "Kondu" is from the verb "to suddenly place."  There's an old law that if you start building a house on a property that's not yours after dusk and move in by daylight, you can't easily be thrown out.

Istanbul hillsides are covered with concrete and tar paper gecekondular. Some six million people, mostly migrants from the Anatolian hinterlands who were absent that day at construction school when they talked about plumb lines, live in them.  Some Gecekondular neighborhoods have taken on a degree of permanence; others collapse into heaps when there's a strong wind.

Istanbul's architectural heritage is too rich to limit our design influences to just gecekondu style. Crane your neck upward in any neighborhood -- rich or poor -- and you'll find top floor additions (identifiable by poorly matched paint and textures), oddly angled wrought iron terraces and even, inexplicably, the foc'sle of a ship. When it comes to building enhancements, Turknology knows no limits.

 Our team of Ginger Kondu designers incorporated all key design elements -- asymmetry, high quality adhesives and lifestyle adaptation -- to our Ginger Kondu. To maintain accuracy, all health and safety standards were ignored and construction detritus littered the site.

We blame these increasingly common and misguided bursts of creativity on the weak dollar. Frustrated by the high cost and low value of going out in Istanbul, we started entertaining at home much more often. The result: epic Sunday dinners, 10 hour long Christmas tree decorating sessions, knife fights and lengthy discussions about camera angles on Digiturk's Fish Channel.

Comments

[jes]

gummy bears ..... missing a bit of the post I think.

[paula]

You guys kill me. Wish you were here or we were there. It would be much more fun (we have 10" of snow, a little ice and it is 19 degrees out)

[jes]

I think the ginger kondu was made all the more real when it collapsed.

[Paula]

just like half the roofs in Portland. Only now they are under water because it warmed up and started to rain. Got to love the Arctic Blast/tropical hurricane combo. We got 2" of rain New Years Eve/Day and are expected to get another 1-3" between last night and Wednesday.

[Megan]

Damn I'm jealous, my pepparkakshus broke in the box. :-(

[Mitch Yuko]

You people are a tiny bit condescending, aren't you?

I know it must be distressing to live in the same city as all these involuntarily poor, uneducated people who weren't born into circumstances fortunate enough to enable them to globtrot around and complain about other cultures, but I think making a gingerbread house that makes fun of the slum/shantytowns is a little distasteful. I guess when the next big earthquake hits Istanbul you'll just say to yourself that the Proles had it coming.

[Mitch Yuko]

sorry Megan I didn't mean that specifically to you, but rather the authors of the blog