Toronto For the fifth year in a row, architects, designers and engineers are building a big donation for the Daily Bread Food Bank. It's all thanks to the CANstruction challenge. Held by the Society of Design Administration (SDA), this design-and-build competition showcases giant sculptures made of canned foods.

The rules specify that each self-supporting structure can fill a 10-foot-square footprint and be stacked up to eight feet high. A lit-up Toronto streetcar was just one of the amazing entries last year. Thirteen five-member teams had worked for seven hours on the dozen sculptures and piled up 60,000 pounds of canned foods in the process. After a two-week exhibit at the TD Centre in November, the structures are dismantled and the cans of food are donated.

“The food bank told us we are the largest ever one-time contributor,” says Helen Kabriel, a comptroller at Diamond & Schmidt Architects Incorporated and an SDA member.”

Visit www.sdacanada.com and www.canstructionvancouver.com, respectively, for information on the Toronto and Vancouver CANstruction competitions.