Every year, at various cities in North America, CANstruction events are held as a way of raising awareness of hunger and gathering donations for local food banks. Teams are challenged to build large structures/sculptures entirely from canned food and other non-perishable items. Back in September, David Moses of Moses Structural Engineers asked us if we would like to work with them on a submission for the 2011 event in Toronto. As architects we deal with the physical realm all the time but there is always some degree of disconnection. This little project was a nice way to get our hands and minds working at all levels, start to finish.

Concept

While there are endless possibilities for sculptures conveying something rendered in cans, we decided to investigate the possibilities for a less representational sculpture that explores the structural nature of stacked cans. That or maybe we couldn’t decide which can-base pun was best – (CANdemonium, CANyon, Yes we CAN, etc.).

mesh form

We had been really inspired by the work of these guys and the way simple variations in the repetitive stacking of consistent elements could lead to complex forms. The idea was simple, with each successive course of stacked cans, we would morph one profile into another, creating an undulating wall.

Mesh with cans applied

This had a couple benefits. First, the end product would be a full-scale ‘thing’ rather than a model of something else. Also, we could tune the eventual design to the number of cans we were able to fundraise for.

Mike Lanctot here at Altius worked out a way to model can structures with Blender, using deformed meshes with cans attached to the nodes. Blender does include a physics engine so we were able to roughly simulate the stability of can structures. You can see the results below.

Fundraising

A separate and almost more important part of the project was acquiring the actual cans for the build. After talking to teams who have participated in the past, we realized we would require thousands of cans. The project took on a new meaning when we learned this. Full credit owed to Steve Mah at Moses and Andrea here at Altius for staying on top of the coordination and keeping us on track. Ingrid McDonald headed up the fundraising for the can purchase, reaching out to suppliers and clients of both our firms for support. We dealt with the local Metro grocery store for the can purchase. They had helped other CANstruction teams in the past and knew what to do.

In the end, we had 3000 cans of soup to build with.

Putting it all together

Too complex...

With only a couple days to go before build, we felt we were pushing the intent for the form too far and were a bit nervous about physically constructing the thing in one night. Some testing with cans revealed that they are quite slippery when stacked in a common bond pattern.

We pulled back the complexity, eventually ending up with a plan for a couple walls, 3 cans deep, built of an arc repeated 3 times. Over the total height, those 3 arcs transition into a straight line.

Plan view of the lowest course of cans

We drew up the plan for each level of the can structure and printed them out at full size. With each course using the same curve 3 times, we greatly reduced the amount of cardboard templates we would need. I think this saved us on build night as the simple templates saved a tonne of time that we would have spent placing the cans.

reusable templates simplified the placement

Build night

Build night arrived and the cans were successfully delivered to the TD center. It was a bit of a shock to see 3000 soup cans together and it hinted at just how much work we had ahead of us. After Mike had marked the initial placement of the walls with masking tape on the floor, we got to work.

that's a lot of cans

Our construction eventually resolved itself into a teams of can placers and can tapers. After each course we laid clear packing tape across the tops of the cans to tie everything together and preventing the cans from sliding out of place. On the build night Steve Mah, David Moses, Antonio Franco, Allison Gonsalves, Manuel Bicudo, Joe Knight, and Hannah Slaughter participated. Mike Lanctot was the mastermind, keeping us all on track

The solution: tape, tape, and more tape

There were some sore backs amongst the build team members after a 7-hour building session that ended at one in the morning. It was a long process but a great culmination of a couple months of planning and organizing. After the judging, we took home an Honourable Mention, which was a nice touch. We’re hoping we’ll be able to do the same thing again next year, and push the limits of can structures further.

After 7 hours of building

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