Canned food pulls double duty as art and as a lifeline

By KRISTIN DIZON
P-I REPORTER

The red convertible was sculpted from cans of Hunt's tomato sauce. Its wheels were Skippy peanut butter jars.

It looked like something in which a toddler would love to climb, but in a few days the car will become meals on dinner tables for the hungry across Western Washington.

It's part of a creation at Canstruction, an annual competition in which architects and engineers build structures out of canned food, then donate the food to Food Lifeline, Washington's largest food bank.

This year's four can sculptures -- the Washington state quarter, a pond with breaching salmon, a light bulb and a car on Interstate 405 -- will be on display on the first floor of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center through Monday evening. People can vote for their favorite by adding a donation to the box in front of it.

Canstruction, born 15 years ago in Seattle, is now a national competition in 80 cities that raises awareness of hunger and encourages donations to food banks. The event hit a lull the past few years here and wasn't held at all in 2006, but organizers are bringing it back.

"It's a substantial amount of food at this time of year, because donations to food banks are down," said Holly Firmin, marketing manager of Food Lifeline, which serves more than 560,000 people in Western Washington. That drop comes at the same time that need rises, because many children who qualify for subsidized or free meals at school are out for the summer.

The most popular building bricks in the exhibit are protein-rich foods. In particular, Chicken of the Sea tuna and salmon are favored -- because the cans are small and can be bought in bulk at Costco. Canned vegetables follow close behind, perhaps because Canstruction's rules dock teams for using canned junk food.

Mortar comes in the form of wire and double-sided tape, but no glue is allowed.

The five judges -- three engineers, an architect and the former director of Seattle Center -- took their job very seriously Friday, inspecting and discussing the four creations for more than an hour.

But spectators often weren't sure what they were viewing.

"What is it?" one woman asked, gazing at a canstruction topped with white stringed lights.

"It's a light bulb," another explained.

"Ohhhh."

Yes, the light bulb had gone on.

"It takes awhile," Firmin said, explaining another canstruction. "You have to stare at it."

True enough. Several missed the "No Can-gestion," spelled on a reader board over the convertible on an Interstate 405 made of 6-plus-pound cans of tomatoes and green beans.

The Washington state quarter puzzled a few bystanders, too. A deconstructed 3-D version of the 25-cent piece, it's a disc of chicken-broth cans, impressively turned on their sides rather than stacked, and supported by thin-gauge wire. Mount Rainier's outline is built into the disc, and in front of that is a hillock of green asparagus cans representing the forest. In the immediate foreground, a salmon -- Chicken of the Sea salmon cans -- leaps in water (more canned chicken broth).

Designed by Mahlum Architects and ARUP, an engineering firm, the 7 1/2-foot-tall coin was built from 3,000 cans at a cost of about $1,500.

"When we first thought of it, we thought, 'Oh, there's no way this is going to happen,' " said Andrew Griffin of Mahlum.

But build it they did, in four and a half hours. And it was the jurors' favorite -- decided without the toss of a quarter.