initial wireframe layout

Teehan+Lax have put together a stunning new website for us and we’re excited to share our work in a fantastic new way. Working with these talented designers was an interesting process: architects don’t often get to be design clients themselves. It was nice to sit at the other side of the table and watch a design take shape.

We’ve had a relationship with Teehan+Lax for a while, having designed a house for Jeremy Bell, partner at Teehan+Lax, that was completed in 2009. More recently, we’ve finished up a new house for Geoff Teehan and family. In 2010 the company moved into the office next door to us at 109 Atlantic. It seemed only natural that T+L work on our much-needed new site.

All too often, architects assume that because they can design and build buildings, they can design anything. In this case however, we sat back let the experts do what they do best. Geoff and Travis brought amazing expertise and design skills to the process and the new site is far better than we could imagine, let alone put together ourselves. They took a hard look at how our new site needed to function and pared the core structure down to exactly what it needs to be.

As Geoff Teehan puts it: this is the house they built for us.

On top of fantastic graphic design, it’s a much richer experience, all the while being easier to use. As a primary point of access for clients (both potential and existing) and the public, the website functions at a level beyond a mere portfolio… it’s an overall better user experience that conveys who we are and what we can do.

a more developed concept

We hope you enjoy.

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Concept

While there are endless possibilities for sculptures conveying something rendered in cans, we decided to investigate the possibilities for a less representational sculpture that explores the structural nature of stacked cans. That or maybe we couldn’t decide which can-base pun was best – (CANdemonium, CANyon, Yes we CAN, etc.).

mesh form

We had been really inspired by the work of these guys and the way simple variations in the repetitive stacking of consistent elements could lead to complex forms. The idea was simple, with each successive course of stacked cans, we would morph one profile into another, creating an undulating wall.

Mesh with cans applied

This had a couple benefits. First, the end product would be a full-scale ‘thing’ rather than a model of something else. Also, we could tune the eventual design to the number of cans we were able to fundraise for.

Mike Lanctot here at Altius worked out a way to model can structures with Blender, using deformed meshes with cans attached to the nodes. Blender does include a physics engine so we were able to roughly simulate the stability of can structures. You can see the results below.

Fundraising

A separate and almost more important part of the project was acquiring the actual cans for the build. After talking to teams who have participated in the past, we realized we would require thousands of cans. The project took on a new meaning when we learned this. Full credit owed to Steve Mah at Moses and Andrea here at Altius for staying on top of the coordination and keeping us on track. Ingrid McDonald headed up the fundraising for the can purchase, reaching out to suppliers and clients of both our firms for support. We dealt with the local Metro grocery store for the can purchase. They had helped other CANstruction teams in the past and knew what to do.

In the end, we had 3000 cans of soup to build with.

Putting it all together

Too complex...

With only a couple days to go before build, we felt we were pushing the intent for the form too far and were a bit nervous about physically constructing the thing in one night. Some testing with cans revealed that they are quite slippery when stacked in a common bond pattern.

We pulled back the complexity, eventually ending up with a plan for a couple walls, 3 cans deep, built of an arc repeated 3 times. Over the total height, those 3 arcs transition into a straight line.

Plan view of the lowest course of cans

We drew up the plan for each level of the can structure and printed them out at full size. With each course using the same curve 3 times, we greatly reduced the amount of cardboard templates we would need. I think this saved us on build night as the simple templates saved a tonne of time that we would have spent placing the cans.

reusable templates simplified the placement

Build night

Build night arrived and the cans were successfully delivered to the TD center. It was a bit of a shock to see 3000 soup cans together and it hinted at just how much work we had ahead of us. After Mike had marked the initial placement of the walls with masking tape on the floor, we got to work.

that's a lot of cans

Our construction eventually resolved itself into a teams of can placers and can tapers. After each course we laid celar packing tape across the tops of the cans to tie everything together and preventing the cans from sliding out of place. On the build night Steve Mah, David Moses, Antonio Franco, Allison Gonsalves, Manuel Bicudo, Joe Knight, and Hannah Slaughter participated. Mike Lanctot was the mastermind, keeping us all on track

The solution: tape, tape, and more tape

There were some sore backs amongst the build team members after a 7-hour building session that ended at one in the morning. It was a long process but a great culmination of a couple months of planning and organizing. After the judging, we took home an Honourable Mention, which was a nice touch. We’re hoping we’ll be able to do the same thing again next year, and push the boundaries of can structures more.

After 7 hours of building

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