CANstruction is a charity initiative in order to fight against hunger around the world. It is about a yearly competition that aims at raising both money and, mostly, tons of food in order to donate to local food banks. This competition is citywide and present in more than 170 cities. In each city, the subscribed teams create CANstructions, constructions made out of cans!
In New York, the contestants are 20 architecture / structural engineer companies and the CANstructions are built at the Brooksfield Place, next to the One World Trade Center at Lower Manhattan. These pieces of art stay there for two weeks for the public. After that, there is an event to announce the winner for each category:
- Best Meal
- Structural Ingenuity
- Best Original Design
- Most Cans
- Best Use of Labels
- and People’s Choice awards.
As in this year the competition happened in early November, right after Halloween, my team (Gilsanz Murray Steficek LLP) decided to do a CANstruction related to a halloween recipe: a pumpkin pie … but we called that the PumpCAN Pi!. Yes, it is an unwritten rule that every CANstruction name has to be a pun with the word «can», so we decided not only to make one pun, but two (the second one being with the «pie» – «pi»). My favorite one (both the structure and the name) this year was the «WaCANda Forever», a giant sculpture of the Black Panther’s head. The team that made this one used very small cans, so they could do a very well detailed CANstruction.
You can see below our beautiful PumpCAN Pi! There is a considerably large span and cantilever to be supported there, so we couldn’t just trust it’d stand still without testing it before. Luckily we built this one week before the build night at our office, because we had planned it to be quite larger than what is ended up being.
