A Birthday Cake for Ghent University

To celebrate the bicentenary of Ghent University in 2017, we concocted a huge birthday cake. It formed the concluding part of a large-scale exhibition on the history of the institution. We gathered the ingredients from sixteen UGent buildings and campuses: the Ledeganck building, the Therminal, the Sterre, the Dunant Campus, the Coupure Campus, the Monovolume, Tweekerken, the Rommelaere, the Guislain (both old and new), the S9, the Rectorate, Blandijn Boudewijn, the Aula, the Book Tower and the Jozef Plateau building. We reconstructed them to scale in soft plastic foam and stacked them into a 7-metre high, festive cake. A short walk through the bottom layer offered a wild perspective on the familiar university buildings.