Pumpkin ‘Slice’ Is Back
Architecture School Resurrects Halloween Mainstay to Connect After COVID
Seniors Amelia Eastman and Abby Perkins critique carved creations on judgment day at the Architecture Building, including a clever pumpkin portrait of Architecture Program Director Brian Kelly by the contest's top winner, Ben Bilo '23.
Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle
The guts were everywhere. Knife in hand, the student exhibited unusual coolness as he sliced into the flesh with a surgeon’s precision.
This wasn’t a scene from Netflix’s latest slasher movie. It was the revival of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s (MAPP) pumpkin-carving contest, where students—and the occasional faculty—unsheathe their X-Acto knives and unleash their creativity to earn bragging rights for the most stunning gouged gourd.
A time-honored tradition in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the contest returned this year to reconnect MAPP’s community after COVID.
“MAPP has always had a very tight-knit, close community, and it’s one of our greatest assets as a school,” said Dean Dawn Jourdan. “This contest is a way for us to rediscover that feeling after spending so much time apart.”
Forty years have changed the competition scope from a contest among architecture students over dollar beers during the weekly Friday afternoon happy hour to something more interdisciplinary, with the addition of planning, real estate and preservation students. The pot was sweetened from mere bragging rights to include 3-D-printed medals, presented to the winners during MAPP’s Halloween party last night.
“It was certainly a great memory from my time in architecture school, and I love to see it coming back,” said MAPP Librarian Cindy Frank ’85.
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