Every year in November teams of architects, designers, contractors, and even high school students enter the Canstruction Houston event – a massive food drive that collects thousands of cans of food for the Houston Food Bank.
The catch – create sculptures using nothing but those cans.
Seems simple, right? How hard is it to just stack cans on top of each other?
You’d be surprised how hard it is to turn 4,000 to 6,000 cans or more into a giant Godzilla or octopus, a multi-lane bowling alley, a triple-deck baseball stadium, or chessboard and pieces, or a six-foot-tall hourglass.
The entire process of competing in Canstruction Houston starts months before the event even occurs. The first thing is trying to come up with an interesting idea that is also possible to be done in cans. Thanks to gravity, what you can do with your cans is limited – so trees or bridges or anything else where a can would have to be suspended is pretty much impossible to make, within the rules of the competition.
Once the idea is formulated and a quick sketch is drawn, then comes the design. Using any number of computer programs, a team member creates the design, placing the cans in place to tediously create a 3D model of your sculpture. But that is just one step. While placing the cans into place, you need to select the color you need to bring your design to life.
Now that the model is complete, we get to head over to the grocery store, starting the journey of looking at hundreds of cans and deciding which color red is best, what blue you want, and if this shade of yellow looks better than that shade of yellow. But color isn’t the only decider, can size and stackability are just as important of a factor.
Eventually, the individual cans are chosen, the number needed for each can is determined by going back to the model, and finally, the cans are purchased. This year, Canstruction-Houston is partnering with Kroger, who have agreed to deliver all the cans purchased through their store to the George R. Brown Convention Center. It is not an easy or quick task to load thousands of cans onto carts and dollies, wheel them to your build space, and then unpack the individual cans from their bulk packaging.
But all of this work is done to lead to the actual construction of your sculpture. Slowly but surely the design – one that has been only a 3D model on paper - comes to life. One can at a time, one layer at a time, your idea becomes a giant dollar bill, a 14-foot long, six-foot tall wall with designs of college logos, or a replica of the Arch of Constantine in Rome (or even that bridge that couldn’t be done!).
By the end of the build, everyone is exhausted but at the same time feeling good about what was just done. Thanks to a group of people, thousands of cans have been purchased and turned into giant sculptures that will last for only a week as they will then be delivered to the Houston Food Bank. In 2023, 109,151 pounds of cans delivered to the Food Bank helped provide 90,959 meals.
And that is what Houston Canstruction is all about.
We are so proud to have been a part of this event for decades. All of the examples mentioned in this article were structures we have personally created for events over the years. This year we will once again be participating in Canstruction with our sculpture “Torching Hunger: One Taco con Sopita at a Time” inspired by Torchy (Torchy’s Tacos adorable mascot). We have partnered with Torchy’s Tacos, SpawGlass, John F. Turner Engineers, Pacific Star Capital LLC, CTC Construction, Evergreen Construction, and NIT Industrial to donate 3,640 cans to the Houston Food Bank.
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