In this project, our group, named team BLEND, had to come up with a design for an interesting structure made out of cans of food.

Above is a compiled page of all our plans and the idea we settled on for our design: a model of DNA made out of twisting two stacks of cans around each other in double-helix fashion, with rungs of cans between the pillars.

A mock-up of our idea, in the first layer.  Myself (holding the trio of cans), with my teammates (Levi, Brian, and Ethan (not in the picture)), showing off our idea in how we planned to join the cans together with tape, and create visible rungs in the model.

In our initial build, the first layer was able to stand on its own, however whenever we attempted to build higher than the first rung, the structure would become unstable and fall over.

After thinking over ideas as a group, we finally decided to ammend our design and rebuild the structure to be more solid, which made the overall build much easier and much more stable.  We resorted to using 1.5 inch diameter PVC pipe to support the stacks of cans as they began to become too heavy to support one another.  Limited on color options, we tried to keep the look of a DNA molecule with the white tomato and mushroom soup cans, and the orange cans to fill in the spaces.

A bird's-eye-view of our build, showing the twist our project managed to obtain in trying to form a double-helix shape.

The backside of our project, where again you can see more PVC pipe supporting the overhanging cans from tipping over.

In total, our group was able to quickly come up with a new design after the first did not work to our expectations.  We were informed later that the structure was able to support itself for a while afterward (though it did end up falling over the next day).

We all concluded together that cans are not a suitable building material.