TORONTO—When Kevin Dahi began his new job as an in-house designer for architecture firm Norr last September, he was directed to design a calendar using local recipes from cities where the company had designed landmark buildings. 

Dahi built minature models using ingredients native to the buildings' locations

“I thought it was a cool idea to have recipes and food,” says Dahi, who moved to Toronto from Dubai two years ago. “But what does all of the food and recipes have to do with our profession?” He decided to use ingredients from each recipe to build models of the structures parent company Ingenium had designed.

To convince his superiors that the idea was sound, Dahi took elk steak, dried porcini mushrooms and chopped onions from a recipe for Opal Falls elk steaks and created a model of the National Bank of Dubai. The idea was approved and Dahi spent the next two months building food models, photographing them and laying out the calendar’s pages.
  
The results can be seen in Ingenium’s 2009 Edible Architecture From Around the World calendar, which was recently mailed to the company’s North American clientele.

Dahi spent two to 10 hours building each food structure. He says the most difficult model was for the Motor City Casino in Detroit, built with pepperoni, green and red peppers, and cheese – the ingredients for Motor City Square deep dish pizza. “The building itself is very complicated,” Dahi said.

In total, about $300 was spent on ingredients for the models. Contact:www.theingeniumgroup.com; www.norrlimited.com