School of Architecture Dean Robert Stern ARC ’65 may be designing Yale’s new residential colleges, but undergraduate architecture students have taken the lead in perfecting the plans for the North Pole’s new college for elves.

Students set to work on their designs Monday afternoon in the Morse College dining hall with gingerbread, frosting, candies and gummies as materials. Though the event was sponsored by Ink and Vellum, Yale’s undergraduate architecture society, it has traditionally welcomed students from all disciplines, organizer Katherine Dyke ’12 said. The event has encouraged students to build around a different theme every year, she said.

“It’s a fun way of coming together with your classmates to play,” Dyke explained. “Last year we even focused on building houses that had something to do with Lady Gaga.”

The afternoon’s finale may have even been practice for final exams for a few of the architecture students involved. The event culminated with reviews of the designs by a panel of architecture professors, a process similar to midterm and final reviews for architecture studio classes, Dyke said.

“I’ve never done something like this before,” Caroline Andersson ‘15, a math major, said. “But I do want to open a bakery when I grow up.”

The Ink and Vellum gingerbread house competition occurs annually near the end of first semester.