RAND's 2017 Canstruction Team (left to right): Orey Graham, Marco Giansante, Chaitanya Patki, Luka Batistic, Ana Sandoval (Captain), Margaret Nash (Co-Captain). Not pictured: Christine Hobsen, Andrew Reynolds
For the 4th year in a row, RAND participated in New York’s Canstruction competition, an annual charity event where engineering and architecture firms from all over the city design and construct structures built entirely out of canned food. These sculptures are publicly displayed at Brookfield Place in lower Manhattan for two weeks, during which time a panel of judges select the winners to receive a variety of awards. While the competitive aspect of the event is a fun motivating factor, our desire to participate stems from being able to give back to the community and help those in need. At the end of the exhibition, each sculpture is taken down and all the food is donated to City Harvest, a New York City food rescue organization, who distributes to 500 community food programs which help feed 1.3 million New Yorkers!
RAND’s Canstruction team started this year’s design process by researching interesting, unique, and fun ideas that we could use for the event. After considering several dozen of our co-worker’s submissions, we almost immediately decided on a picture of the COEXIST bumper sticker. It is rare that we arrive to a unanimous decision so quickly and I believe this was due to the powerful message of tolerance that the image conveyed. In the following weeks, our team considered many design options and settled on creating a curved arch to maximize the size of each individual letter. Ultimately, our “We CAN Coexist” structure consisted of 12 different types of canned food and required over 6,000 cans to build!
Transforming the jpeg of a bumper sticker to an actual 8 foot tall sculpture was no easy task. We quickly realized that “We CAN Coexist” would be our heaviest structure to date and would weigh approximately 3,100 pounds! In fact, the initial design was so top heavy that the arch would sag downwards and to the side. In order to add additional support, our structural engineers designed a cable suspension system that was internally routed to support rods at the base, resulting in the open arch we were able to include. After several rounds of calculations, tweaks, and midnight load tests, we confirmed that our structure would be ready for build night.
As is RAND’s tradition, build night began with a team dinner followed by the unpacking of all our cans. From 6:30 PM on November 1st until 4:00 AM on November 2nd, our team worked tirelessly to erect the sculpture we have been working on since July. At the end of that long night, I went home physically tired and mentally exhausted, but satisfied that all the effort was worth it. Between Canstruction 2017’s twenty-six participants, 92,000 cans of food will be donated to City Harvest, resulting in meals for thousands of hungry New Yorkers. This figure does not even take into account the additional fundraising from each team and the donations provided by the Brookfield public. We are very proud to be a part of this event and are continuously amazed at how beautiful every sculpture turns out.
Thank you to RAND’s Canstruction team leader Ana Sandoval and my fellow team members: Marco Giansante, Orey Graham, Margaret Nash, and Chaitanya Patki for five months of hard work, dedication, and for sacrificing several weekend nights. Thank you to RAND's marketing manager, Jennifer Wu, for sticking with us during the entirety of build night and providing photo documentation of our sculpture. I can’t forget to give a shout out to Canstruction helping-hands Christine Hobson and Andrew Reynolds, without whom we would have never finished on time. Last, but not least, a special thanks to RAND’s President Stephen Varone and the RAND Gives Back program for sponsoring the team’s participation every year.
Congratulations to all of the other 25 teams who competed in this year’s Canstruction New York event, including the award-winners “A Rising Tide”, “Fearless in the Face of Hunger”, “Pining to End Hunger”, “Popeye the Sailor CAN”, “The Giving Tree”, “Beauty and the Feast”, “On Track to End Hunger”, and “Your Smile CAN Change the World”.
We can’t wait to see the new ideas everyone has in 2018!
Watch our team build "We CAN Co-Exist" in under a minute in our time-lapse video.
Luka Batistic is a Structural Team Associate at RAND.
