Fay Jones School Students Hold Successful Sixth CANstruction Event

Fay Jones School students created sculptures from canned and packaged food items.

One student team works to build a sculpture with cans bearing white labels.

The guest and student judges talk with some team members as they assess an entry.

This team in particular battled the wind to keep their stacked cans from blowing over.

The theme “Hunger Stinks” featured a figure reading a newspaper on the toilet.

Students step back to assess their work.

Students pose for a photo with “Hunger Stinks,” which won the prize for most cans.

Students work together to repair the neck of the figure atop their sculpture.

Students created a Manhattan skyline with a “HurriCANe Sandy” theme.

With a “Hunger Kills” theme, student arranged cans in the form of crime scene outlines.

Spelling out the word “feed” in capital letters won for best theme.

“Canucopia” won for best use of labels in the CANstruction event.

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Students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture competed by building sculptures from canned and packaged food items. The food was donated to food pantries after the competition.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Designs in the sixth annual CANstruction event were diverse: a white toilet, bold letters spelling out F-E-E-D and a Manhattan skyline, referencing the destruction and aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The designs were built Dec. 3 in the plaza between the Arkansas Union and Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus.

The more than 2,100 canned and packaged food items raised by the event were donated to the University of Arkansas Full Circle Campus Food Pantry and the food pantry at Cooperative Emergency Outreach in Fayetteville. Students collected many of the cans, and interior design faculty donated others. This year, for the first time, two local suppliers to Walmart donated food products for this project. Combined, Del Monte and Heinz donated 864 cans.

More than 100 first-year design students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture – representing architecture, interior design and landscape architecture – constructed sculptures from the collected food. One group, whose sculpture was more vertical, fought the wind to keep the stacked cans from being blown down.

The prize for most cans used went to the toilet, which had about 800 cans, all with white labels. That sculpture, called “Hunger Stinks,” also won for Judges’ Choice. “Feed NWA” won for best theme, while “Canucopia” won for best use of labels.

Judges for this year’s event were Denise Garner, founder of Feed Fayetteville, a local organization dedicated to alleviating hunger in the community; Adrienne Shaunfield, director of Feed Fayetteville; Dusty Westfall, interior design student; Brandon Doss, landscape architecture student; and Calli Verkamp, architecture student.

Garner addressed the crowd of students, thanking them for their commitment to the food drive and for spreading awareness of the hunger issue. She also explained why she started Feed Fayetteville in 2011 and why the students’ donations were so important to the community.

When Garner was invited to be part of Gov. Mike Beebe’s task force on child hunger, she discovered that Washington and Benton counties have the highest rate of child hunger in the state – despite having a number of residents at high socioeconomic levels.

“When people think of Northwest Arkansas, they think of us as the land of plenty. But we also have pockets of people who are not getting what they need,” she said.

Garner said there are some 30,000 people in Northwest Arkansas who are food insecure, one-fourth of them children. Washington County also has the highest participation in the food stamp program in the state.

CANstruction is the service project for the Leadership by Design class, which prepares students in the design programs of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture for their 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.

This event began in 2007, 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 was a national charity event sponsored by the Society for Design Administration.

Two years ago, the class donated more than 3,800 canned and packaged food items to the Cooperative Emergency Outreach, and they collected more than 4,400 items last year for the U of A Full Circle Campus Food Pantry. In the last six years, Fay Jones School students have collected and donated about 20,000 food items to area community agencies.