Fay Jones School Students Hold Successful Seventh CANstruction Event

The Pac-CAN design won the Retro Award at CANstruction.

The I Think I CAN locomotive won for Best Use of Labels.

CAN-Cropolis won the Realism Award.

The CAN Francisco Bridge won the Judges’ Choice Award.

Team members with We CAN Tackle Hunger, which won the 3-D Spatial Design Award.

Students load canned and packaged food items they collected for local food pantries.

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The award for Most Cans Used went to CAN-verse – a Converse logo, shoe and the word C-A-N-V-E-R-S-E spelled out – which used 634 cans in all.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Rainfall earlier that morning didn’t put a damper on the seventh annual CANstruction event, held Nov. 15 in the Central Quad plaza between the Arkansas Union and Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus. The designs, constructed by first year design students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture, included a locomotive, football helmet, boxing ring, suspension bridge and ancient Greek structure.

The more than 2,500 canned and packaged food items collected by the students were donated to the University of Arkansas Full Circle Campus Food Pantry and the Fayetteville Public Schools Outback, which operates a food pantry for students.

More than 120 first-year design students – representing architecture, interior design and landscape architecture – constructed sculptures from the collected food.

The award for Most Cans Used went to CAN-verse – a Converse logo, shoe and the word C-A-N-V-E-R-S-E spelled out – which used 634 cans in all.

The Retro Award went to Pac-CAN, a take on the Pac-Man character, and the Realism Award went to CAN-Cropolis, a structure styled like the Acropolis in Greece. The Ozarkansas Award went to Ar-CAN-sas, an outline of the state with cans, while the 3-D Spatial Design Award went to We CAN Tackle Hunger, a football helmet made from white-labeled cans.

The Art and Architecture Award went to Knock Out Hunger, a boxing ring with a crowd watching the fight, and the School Spirit Award went to Say “Snow” to Hunger, a snowman wearing a Hog hat and a scarf. The Best Use of Labels went to a locomotive, I Think I CAN, and the Characterization Award went to CANzilla, a variation on Godzilla.

The CAN Francisco Bridge, a bridge strung with lights, won the Judges’ Choice Award.

Judges for this year’s event were Denise Garner, founder of Feed Fayetteville, a local organization dedicated to alleviating hunger in the community; Angela Oxford, director of the Center for Community Engagement at the U of A; Daniel Caruth, a journalism student and intern at the Full Circle Campus Food Pantry; and Hector Bello and Abigail Charles, Fay Jones School architecture students and teaching assistants for the University Perspectives course.

Garner said that one in four children is food insecure in Washington and Benton counties, as is one in five adults. Although the numbers have improved in the last few years, Washington and Benton counties have the highest rate of child hunger in the state, after Pulaski County.

Garner, who started Feed Fayetteville in 2011, praised the students in the Fay Jones School for their work on this project, saying that it helps promote awareness of the needs.

“Northwest Arkansas still has a huge number of children who don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” she said.

The canned fruit gathered for the event went to the Full Circle Campus Food Pantry, which is currently stocked up on most other items. The canned vegetables, proteins and other items went to the Outback program of Fayetteville Public Schools, where 50 percent of students are in the free and reduced lunch program, Garner said. The food will be sent home with them to help feed them during the holiday break from school.

The CANstruction event started as the service project for the school’s Leadership by Design class, now called University Perspectives, a course that prepares students in the design programs of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture for the rigorous and time-consuming education. First-year students are grouped with upper-level mentors for the semester-long course to address issues of time and stress management, strategies for balancing school and life, and opportunities to get to know others within the design disciplines.

The service project began seven years ago when Judy Brittenum, associate professor of landscape architecture, wanted the students to participate in something fun and design-oriented while also serving the community. After some research, Brittenum and her colleague in the course, Laura Terry, associate professor of architecture, discovered the CANstruction project, a national charity event sponsored by the Society for Design Administration.

While this student event is much smaller in scale than the national event, due to the limited construction time, students in the Fay Jones School have been prolific in acquiring donations. In the last seven years of the CANstruction competition, students have collected and donated about 22,500 food items to area community agencies.