The cans festival

Whether it’s the full-scale Volkswagen Beetle built with cans of refried beans, the Leaning Tower of Pisa constructed from tomato paste tins or the crushed-pineapple rendition of SpongeBob SquarePants, judging at this year’s Society of Design Administration meeting is tough. With 270 enormous and edible structures to choose from, the judges, who are at the San Diego Convention Center this week, have a lot on their plates.

All of the designs were created by architects, engineers, contractors and their students. Ordinarily they work with wood, steel and glass, but on occasion, their attention turns to cans.

All belong to a national organization called CANstruction, a New York-based nonprofit with members in about 50 cities who design and build structures from food cans, knowing they will be torn down and donated to charity.

CANstruction was founded in 1992 “as a community service project that would ... show our industry giving back to the communities we help build,” said Cheri Melillo, the group’s executive director and the office administrator of a firm that won last year’s national competition with an eagle built from espresso containers. Their entry this year: a giant hooded cobra made with 10,000 cans of tuna and spinach, a design Melillo’s colleagues jokingly call “the Atkins diet.”

In 2002, CANstruction members donated more than a million pounds of food to Second Harvest, a network of 180 food banks that redistributes the cans to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and the elderly and day-care centers around the country.

Last year, that meant 3,376,000 meals, according to Melillo. This year, the group is on track to contribute even more, with proceeds from about 400 structures, including a Marilyn Monroe, an oversized raindrop and several SpongeBobs.

Mike Vetters, 32, is an architect with La Jolla-based Island Architects, one of many firms that built the popular cartoon character out of food for this year’s contest.

It took Vetters and seven co-workers more than 10 hours to piece together their 7,000-can structure on Sunday, using, among other things, 286 cans of pineapple for SpongeBob’s body, 183 cans of Spam for his pants and more than 1,000 tins of tuna for a boat and water.

The design is entirely self-supporting except for “a little Velcro here and there,” said Vetters, whose firm competed for the first time last year with a 7-foot-tall panda bear made from canned water chestnuts and peanuts, a sculpture they nicknamed “Canda.”

CANstruction participants tend to be a bit punny. A King Kong design entered in last year’s competition came with the title “Can Kong,” and the creators of this year’s Volkswagen Beetle submission, made out of refried beans and Vienna sausages, suggested the car could run on the gas created from eating such things.

Per CANstruction’s rules, structures can measure no larger than 10 feet wide, 10 feet deep and 8 feet tall. While there is no limit to the number of cans that can be used, the sculptures typically use from about 500 to 10,000. Many current and previous entries can be viewed on the group’s Web site, www.canstruction.com.

Each firm is responsible for obtaining its own cans, some of which are purchased outright, others with discounts from grocery stores and food manufacturers.

All of the containers must be full and packaged with their original labels, which cannot be altered, removed or covered up.

Incidental materials such as cardboard, rubber bands, wire and tape are allowed to help hold things together, but the structures must be otherwise self-supporting. The judges select the winner based on sculptural ingenuity, awarding its creators not money but a simple statue made from Avonite, a common construction material.

All of this year’s competing designs were submitted on slides, with the exception of Island Architects’ creation.

SpongeBob SpamPants, as Vetters calls him, is the only CANstruction construction on site at this week’s SDA convention and is on view through Saturday afternoon, at which time it will be disassembled and given to the San Diego Food Bank.

Until then, Vetters said, “Hopefully nobody will get gropey fingers.”

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CANstruction

What: SpongeBob SpamPants, a sculpture made entirely from food cans

Where: San Diego Convention Center, 111 Harbor Drive, San Diego, near Exhibit Hall C

When: Through Saturday

Info: (619) 525-5959