Cans of green beans, bags of white rice and bottles of water were brought to life Saturday at Warehouse Row as local architects and middle school students competed in the national Canstruction design competition.
The six teams transformed cans and other nonperishable food items into structures of a garden, polar bear, smart car, light switch, fluorescent light bulb and world map for this year's theme of "Canservation." In its eighth year in Chattanooga, the competition will provide more than 11,000 cans to the Chattanooga Area Food Bank when the structures are taken down in a week.
"The structures just get better and better every year as the architects get better at doing it," said Tonya Gentry, an organizer of the event.
Savannah Walker, a seventh-grade student at Lookout Valley Middle School, and her classmate Danielle Whited said they had to use a lot of problem solving to build their structure. Difficulties getting the small tuna and sardine cans to stack correctly provided an initial setback for the team, they said.
"We had a few bumps," Danielle said. "We thought it was going to be a lot easier than what it was."
The biggest obstable for the team was getting the cans to stay even, said Savannah as she watched her teammates and architects from Neuhoff Taylor Architects stack cans of evaporated milk and Hershey's syrup to form what would become a 6-foot-tall fluorescent light bulb.
The Signal Mountain Middle School team, which was paired with River Street Architecture, also had a tough start creating its cylindrical world map, said Jessica Stack with the architecture firm.
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?More than 11,000 cans were used to make the six structures. Here's how many were in each:* 912: Garden by Advanced Energy Engineering & Design with Red Bank Middle School* 2,140: Polar bear by Artech Design Group with East Hamilton Middle School* 2,617: Smart car by Elemi Architects with Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts* 1,975: Light switch by March Adams & Associates with Tyner Middle Academy* 1,600: Fluorescent light bulb by Neuhoff Taylor Architects with Lookout Valley Middle School* 2,138: World map by River Street Architecture with Signal Mountain Middle SchoolSource: Participating architects and teachers.
"It was a little bit rocky at first, trying to just figure it out, get the structure going," she said, noting the team tweaked the structure by taking out several rows in the middle. "The kids have taken some artistic liberties figuring out where things go."
Aside from giving the students and architects a chance to think outside the box, the competition also serves as a food drive for the Chattanooga Area Food Bank, said Gary Paul, the organization's director. The food used in the structures goes into the food bank's emergency food box program, which gave out 17,000 boxes to families in Hamilton County last year, he said.
"I think this year we have just a lot of diversity in the structures and the designs are very unique," Mr. Paul said. "A lot of this food, within the next three weeks, will be on somebody's table."
Five local judges were chosen to evaluate the structures for four national and two local awards, Ms. Gentry said. The winners will be announced at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at Warehouse Row.