This past weekend, PAYETTE participated in CANstruction Boston 2019, and our submission took home the prize for Director’s Favorite! The annual competition offers architects, engineers and students a chance to both flex their design skills and give back to the community. Sculptures built with non-perishable food products, fill the gallery spaces of the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) as well as both Atlantic Wharf lobbies. The Boston chapter of CANstruction has steadily grown since its founding in 1995, and PAYETTE has participated every year since 2000.
The theme for this year’s event was “Around the World,” and while many teams interpreted the theme of ‘Around the World’ with maps and globes, we abstracted the concept into modes of transport. We had floated the idea of a blimp, sailboat and airplane before settling on two ideas: a submarine or the Daft Punk Helmet. The concept of the submarine was transformed and won our internal office vote when we decided to turn it into the famed Yellow Submarine.
Our Beatles-inspired structure used a total of approximately 1,900 cans. We primarily used tuna cans for a higher fidelity of curvature in section and to make the structure more horizontal. In order to create such a large cantilever at the tail, we used taller cans spanning between multiple layers vertically to act as columns while the central tower and front act as counterweights.
All food items used in our structure will be donated to the Merrimack Valley Food Bank along with all the other cans after the structures come down. The structures will be on view until October 25th. The total can count this year is 80,166 cans!
A big thank you to everyone that helped make this structure possible:
Casey Mahoney, Parke MacDowell, Parry Heavlin, Alex Zink, Melissa Allen, Liz Cooney, Justin Miller, Shreeya Shakya
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.