Certainly, Rome was hardly built in a day.
But the Bartholomew County Courthouse was — at least the canned food version, anyway.
A creative replica of the classic structure, stacked with an overflowing supply of Hunt’s tomato sauce, is among four winners judges selected from Saturday’s opening of the annual CANstruction fundraiser for area food banks.
A team called CAN’d Structors from the local Strand Associates civil engineering firm on Washington Street titled its entry “Taking Hunger to Court.” And the 13-member team also included the Bartholomew County Memorial for Veterans in the build that was done at FairOaks Mall, 2380 25th St. in Columbus.
The design won best use of labels.
The idea required about 80 hours of planning and 24 pages of drawings, including at least six visits to area grocery stores to figure out which can labels would best represent the historic building. Plus, it required 5,215 cans.
“Doing the courthouse was kind of a team decision,” said team captain Zak Ruehman. “We initially thought about doing Conversation Plinth from Exhibit Columbus. But we couldn’t exactly figure out how to make it look right with cans.”
CANstruction is an international design and engineering competition in which teams build large structures completely out of canned food. After the local competition, the cans used for building and those used by the public for voting for their favorite design are donated to the food banks of Love Chapel, Salvation Army and the Community Center of Hope.
Voting for the public’s People’s Choice Award runs through Sunday at the mall with cans of food or via financial donations online at uwbarthco.org/2019-canstruction-peoples-choice-voting.
For more on this story, see Thursday’s Republic.
