While Easter has huge significance for those of Christian faith with the story of death and rising again, for the rest of largely heathen New Zealand Easter mainly seems to mean gorging on chocolate and doing a spot of shopping.

Do chocolate and architecture mix? Well, almost. Here is the world’s largest easter egg (in 2005) from the Belgian chocolate producer Guylian in the city of St. Niklaas, so big you could almost live in it: certainly more likely than living after eating it.

The egg measured 8.32 metres high and took twenty-six craftsman a total of 525 hours to build with 1950 kg of chocolates. It beat the record of Kwazulu-Natal in South-Africa in 1996, with a comparitively tiny egg only 7.65 metres high.

Perhaps staying in the realm of egg-shaped architecture, Italian designer Luigi Colani built a ovoid kitchen way back in the late sixties – still available in 1971. Replete with golden interior, and the latest shiny steel stove, its a good example of prefabricated modular bathrooms from the era, before the world got all very orthogonal and rectangular.

Or a chocolate cafe, with the original Wonder Wall (I have no idea what Oasis were singing about, but I can understand this beauty).


But lastly, and certainly not leastly, the best place to look for massive architectural forms at this time of the year is of course on Easter Island itself, where the giant moai statues still stand,

remnant of a lost polynesian civilisation, who consumed too much and used up all their resources. There have to be lots of very telling lessons for us there, given by the mass of people I saw invading the Warehouse today, and coming out with 1kg “The Pig” chocolate eggs.

Nom, nom, nom…   Happy Easter!

gm