RAND’s Canstruction sculpture of Yoshi was built with 6,114 cans of food.
To help feed hungry families, RAND is proud to participate in Canstruction, an annual charity event in which local engineering and architecture firms build sculptures out of canned foods for a public art exhibition. The cans used in the sculptures are donated to City Harvest, a local food bank dedicated to helping feed those in need. Last year our sculpture of a puppy, “Hounding Hunger,” won Best Meal, so we were especially looking forward to putting our design and build skills to work on an even bigger scale this year.
For this year’s 23rd annual Canstruction New York, which took place from November 5 to November 16 at Brookfield Place in the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, the RAND team “canstructed” the lovable Yoshi character from the Super Mario Bros. video game.
After lots of live load calculations and late nights and weekend practice builds of our Yoshi sculpture, we were raring to go on the official build night on November 5. Starting at 6:30 PM, we worked with an assembly-line efficiency that Henry Ford would have been proud of—unpacking cans, passing them to each other, checking labels, and carefully positioning each can where it belongs—as Yoshi slowly took form.
At nearly 3:00 AM (and 20 cups of coffee and one towed car later) we completed our massive “Pipe Down Hunger” sculpture, which consisted of 6,114 cans of food including chili, chicken, peas, beans, sardines, corn, carrots, tomato sauce, pumpkin, sauerkraut, and mixed fruits. We were exhausted but immensely gratified to see Yoshi come to life after all of our hard work. (See the time-lapse video of the RAND Construction team in action.)
RAND's Canstruction Team accepts the award for "Best Meal" for the second year in a row.
At the November 9 Canstruction Awards Gala at Battery Gardens Restaurant, the RAND Canstruction team mingled with the other teams and toasted to each other’s successful builds. RAND was honored that our Canstruction sculpture won the “Best Meal Award” for the second year in a row! As proud as we were for the recognition, the real reward was working as part of a team for a good cause and knowing that the cans in our sculpture will go on to feed approximately 4,000 hungry New Yorkers.
A big shout out goes to RAND’s Canstruction team leader Ana Sandoval and our fellow team members: Moulee Basumallik, Alina Dejesus, Enny Filpo, Orey Graham, Cesar Macias, Andrew Reynolds, David Rutter, Joseph Scandurra, Alessandro Spinelli, and Jefferson Zamora. 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 28 teams who competed in this year’s Canstruction New York event and the other winning Cansculptures, including “Cookie Can-ster”, “What’s Up Doc?”, “Wall Street Charging Bull,” “Scare Away Hunger,” and “BatCAN: A Signal to End Hunger.” We’re looking forward to participating again in 2016!
For more on the event, visit Canstruction New York and host Arts Brookfield.
Margaret Nash is a Project Engineer at Rand.
