Architects' "Canstructions" Help Feed Hungry

Many architects have long believed there is a socially-improving component to design and construction, and the idea of designing for the poor has risen to a clarion call of late (Design Like You Give A Damn; Design for the Other 99%; Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism.) Sometimes this impulse takes the form of providing good design to those that cannot afford it; sometimes it uses design to raise awareness or money for a cause. The latter is currently on display in Canstruction, a national project now taking place annually in LA, in which teams of architects labor for months on the creation of structures made almost entirely of canned food, cans that will subsequently be donated to the Los Angeles Food Bank. On show through Friday at the Water Garden in Santa Monica are nine "canstructions," most with punning titles and clever integration of theme and design -- like IronCAN below, where each can contains a foodstuff that provides the nutrient, iron; or, right, Son of CAN, a reworking of Magritte's Son of Man, in which this time around, the tie made of cans of sardines represents the "stranglehold" of hunger. Once the show is over the 30,000 cans will be donated to the Los Angeles Food Bank, in severe need of donations with the numbers of needy currently on the rise. Click here for details.