RAND's Award-Winning 2019 Canstruction Sculpture: Don't Let Hunger DRAG ON
2019 marks my 6th consecutive year as Co-Captain of our RAND Canstruction Team, and this year, we created "Don't Let Hunger Drag On," a behemoth fire-breathing dragon breaking through a wall for our sculpture at the 27th annual Canstruction New York competition, an annual charity event in which local engineering and architecture firms build sculptures out of canned foods for a public art exhibition.
Made up of 6,670 cans, this sculpture was definitely one of the largest we’ve designed and built! While there were no crazy stories of cars-being-towed (2015) or staying up until 4:00AM (2017), we did win the Best Meal Award for the third time in our 10 years of participating in the competition.
But how does it all begin? Let me give you a little behind-the-scenes look at what goes into designing award-winning sculptures for Canstruction.
RAND's 2019 Canstruction Team: Jefferson Zamora, Amy Kurtzberg, Margaret Nash, Andrew Reynolds, Ana Sandoval, Kristel Limbo, Orey Graham, Luka Batistic, Patty Lozoya, Andrew Miller, Emily Silva, Marco Giansante.
First, it helps to have a team that works well together, better yet, one that you enjoy spending additional time with outside of the 40-hour work week. Once you have a team, start to work on brainstorming ideas for the sculpture and open it up to the whole office. We strive for group participation; what can beat involving an entire 105-person office? Once you’ve got the idea for your can creation, get to work on that design as this typically takes the most time. We typically build our entire model using the same applications we use for actual buildings and structures.
Once the design is (nearly) perfected, the can order comes next. We try to use a large variety of cans as we the cans are donated to those in need just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, and we would like our donation to benefit a large majority of recipients. This year, we used cans of corn, beets, peas, carrots, mixed vegetables, chili, beans, peppers, and pumpkin, just to name a few ingredients.
Now that you’ve got the design completed, layout ready, and can order preparing for delivery, it’s time to assemble the structure. We usually practice building our sculptures two to three times before the actual build night, which means a lot of late nights and Saturday mornings, but it’s well worth it to see the final product fully assembled at Brookfield Place in Manhattan, where it is displayed for two weeks to the public. All the canned foods used in the competition will be donated to City Harvest, a New York City-based food rescue organization to feed hungry New Yorkers.
Congratulations to all the teams who participated this year! I can’t wait to see what 2020 brings.
See the photos from build night, and watch RAND's Canstruction Team build "Don't Let Hunger Drag On" in a 1-minute time lapse.
Margaret Nash is a Forensics Team Project Engineer at RAND, and also Co-Captain of RAND's Canstruction Team.
