One Can Make a Difference

March 9, 2009 9:01 PM

Canstructionis a design/build competition currently held in cities throughout North America. Teams of architects, engineers, and students compete to design and build giant structures made entirely from full cans of food.

The results are displayed to the public as magnificent sculpture exhibits in each city where a competition is held. At the close of the exhibitions all of the canned food used in the structures is donated to local food banks for distribution to emergency feeding programs that include pantries, soup kitchens, elderly and day care centers. Since its inception, ten million pounds of food has been donated to aid in the fight against hunger.

posted by netbros (10 comments total)

I find it disturbing that the whale is leaping out of a sea of water bottles.
posted by iamkimiam at 9:05 PM on March 9

I can't believe that no one did a giant can of Campbell's soup.
posted by Oxydude at 9:14 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]

Oxydude: "2I can't believe that no one did a giant can of Campbell's soup."

Too hipster.
posted by iamkimiam at 9:20 PM on March 9

When I saw "Canstruction," I thought this was about making low-cost housing out of shipping containers. When I read the post, I was going to say this is the philosophical opposite of that, but I read the more inside and was relieved about the food donation.

That's all.
posted by lostburner at 10:11 PM on March 9

I love Canstruction.

I work in a set of buildings in Toronto that hosts it every year. I took some pictures of the 2008 event.
posted by geekigirl at 10:26 PM on March 9

A company I used to work for has done this a few times. One time they won the best use of labels award!
posted by zsazsa at 10:29 PM on March 9

The firm I worked for a number of years ago did this a couple times. We were responsible for the pandas on this page, and Spongebob on this page. The 2001 event took place a couple months after 9/11, which explains all the U.S. flags.

Maybe other firms are different or do a better job of it, but for our designs while I was at that firm, what was actually in the cans took the backseat to what the labels looked like - we pretty much came up with the concept first and then found cans to make it work. For the pandas, we at least stuck with a bit of an Asian theme, but I can't imagine anyone would want to eat a meal using most of what we built them with. The bamboo in the background is actual canned bamboo shoots, and the pandas themselves are made of some Asian brand of evaporated milk for the white and chili sauce for the black. I completely forget what they're sitting on. Spongebob was a little more complex, and had some more generally useful ingredients, but no real coherence to them. Spongebob was made of pineapple chunks, his pants were made of Spam (hence the name), the hull of his boat is 12-packs of store-brand knock-off Dr. Pepper with a sail made of 3 different kinds of tuna (there's an anchor design on the sail that's obscured by Spongebob), the killer whale he's caught is two different kinds of water chestnuts, and it swims in an ocean made of yet another type of tuna.

At least tuna isn't such a bad deal, but I really felt sorry for the people who were on the receiving end of our donations. It's worth mentioning that we generally didn't pay for all that stuff ourselves (either us involved in building the thing or our firm) - we solicited donations from our clients, consultants and contractors we worked with. As a reward for contributing, your name would go on the little placard for our firm. I forget what our total bills ended up being, but they were easily into the thousands of dollars. Lucky for us, our clients were mostly mulit-millionaires. For Spongebob, we had enough cans to load three or four pallets, and we rented a truck with a lift gate and a pallet dolly to get them to the building site.

I can't believe that no one did a giant can of Campbell's soup.

I can't tell you how disappointed I am that they never seem to do Warhol's paintings at the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, and just put a can of soup on stage.
posted by LionIndex at 10:31 PM on March 9

Yes, they can.
posted by ooga_booga at 10:34 PM on March 9

This is way more fun than canstration...
posted by schyler523 at 6:07 AM on March 10

It's a bit like cansturbation, though.

I realize they donate it later, but can't they put all that engineering prowess to work finding impressive ways to actually distribute food (the real problem of our era) instead of building abstract monuments to hoarding?
posted by rokusan at 6:10 AM on March 11