Canstruction 

Teaming up to fight hunger with design 

Canstruction® is a unique, international event engaging designers, architects and engineers to use their talents to help those struggling with food insecurity. The event takes place in over 150 cities around the world and raises funds, food, and awareness for local food banks.

When I worked at BA Consulting Group, Canstruction was the most important team building event of the year.

It took months of preparation and coordination and the entire company of close to 65 people came together for brainstorming sessions and the build night. 

BA Group has participated in the Toronto Canstruction events for years. I was on the company team from 2012 to 2016 and led it in 2014 and 2015. 

A QUEEN'S FEAST (2014)

In 2014 I led BA Group’s team in creating “A Queen’s Feast,” a three-sided mural inspired by the graphic style of the street artist Shepard Fairey and intended to thematically tie into the Victoria Day holiday, which took place around the same time as the competition. Our entry was awarded “Best Use of Labels” in Toronto and went on to win “Best Use of Labels” at the international competition. 

Here we all are after finishing building! It's close to midnight, but there's still nearly half the company here, including the CEO. 

The project got a lot of press and even made it on to CTV News! I went to Atlanta to accept our award for Best Use of Labels at the American Institute of Architects (AIA) conference. 

THE PROCESS 

So how does this whole thing come together? Well, it starts with the whole company getting together in the boardroom to shout out suggestions. From the larger group, a small team forms to design and plan the project. Fundraising letters are sent out to raise money, and the team goes can shopping for canned food.

This particular year, we initially decided to do a cottage scene out of cans: a Muskoka chair, pine tree, and sunset. We tried and tried to make it work. We spent endless hours searching for just the right cans, and test building our initial concepts, but we just couldn't make it work. With time running out we knew we had to come up with something else:  

A Queen's Feast came together at my last minute suggestion. The team had just had a failed test build and was sitting around at a loss of what to do.  I thought, what if we did a different sort of mural image: a portrait! With Victoria Day coming up the week of the competition, why not do a Queen's face? Queen Elizabeth is exceptionally recognizable, so we started there... 

I got to work finding source imagery and mapping out how we might make it work. Having seen other Canstruction portrait murals rendered in Shepard Fairey Obama-portrait style, I researched how to achieve the same effect in Photoshop. I created a mockup using the colours of some of the cans we had already planned to use for the failed sunset idea. It was important to have a light tone, mid-tone, and dark tone in order to achieve some level of realism with the portrait. From this mockup, the team used AutoCAD to map out exactly where each can would go. These plans, pictured below, were used by the team as a blueprints to build the project. 

The image below is an enlargement of a portion of the plan used be build Queen Victoria's face.