Pumpkin 'Slice' is Back: MAPP's Pumpkin Carving Contest Returns

By Maggie Haslam / Oct 29, 2021 / Updated Nov 1, 2021

Architecture School Resurrects Halloween Mainstay to Connect After COVID

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Students looking at carved pumpkin
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Students critique carved creations on judgement day at the Architecture Building, including a clever pumpkin portrait of Architecture Program Director, Brian Kelly.(photo credit: Stephanie Cordle, UMD).
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Pumpkins from past contests
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1985's competition brought a variety of building typologies
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Axiom pumpkin
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This pumpkin from 1985 proves you can always be learning.
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1979 competition
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An earlier 1979 competition keeps it current.
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1979 pie
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In 1979, one student took it to a pastry level (right).
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Urban Pumpkin
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1980's Urban Cowboy has nothing on this 1981 gourd recreation.
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1978 pumpkin
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Vegetable imitates architecture in 1978.

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 reignite 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.”

Contest Winner and ARCH Sophomore Ben Bilo.
Contest Winner and ARCH Sophomore Ben Bilo.

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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