Sunday, October 9, 2011
Engineers, architects and builders help children from Bay Area schools build sand castles at San Francisco's Ocean Beach during a fundraiser for Leap, a nonprofit that helps bring visual and performing art into schools.
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Engineers, architects and builders help children from Bay...Volunteers help Bay Area schoolchildren build sand castle...A girl helps build a sand castle during the Ocean Beach
These weren't your ordinary sand castles.
Engineers, architects and builders - along with hordes of small children - descended on Ocean Beach in San Francisco on Saturday for the Bay Area's largest and most intense sand-castle-building contest.
The theme was "sand blast," a term vague enough to allow just about anything to be built. They weren't "castles" as much as they were ideas.
One team built the bird and slingshot from the popular smart-phone game "Angry Birds." Another built a UFO blasting off. There was a giant boom box with a break dancer's shoe in front.
Rooftop School's project was perhaps the most ambitious: Wile E. Coyote riding a rocket to chase down a decoy Road Runner, who, unbeknownst to his pursuer, was strapped with dynamite.
"It's the one time of year that I get to come out and play in the sand," said Jatin Chopra, 29, of San Francisco, whose wife's architecture firm - Bohlin Cywinski Jackson - helped design the Wile E. Coyote scene.
The rules are fairly straightforward. Everything had to come from the beach. No powered machinery. You have four hours to build.
But imaginations and a year of planning can do a lot.
Because the key to a good castle is the water, almost every team dug large ditches, lined them with tarps, and formed bucket brigades to bring water from the ocean. Some dug lined canals that led to the troughs. Last year, one team jury-rigged a bicycle and pumped water from the ocean with pedal power.
"You have to keep drenching it and drenching it," said Kevin Firenze, an estimator with Dome Construction, who with tongue firmly in cheek called himself the "sand master" of the boom box structure. "If you don't pack it in, when you start carving, it falls apart."
"It's all very technical stuff," Firenze said with a smile. "I took a lot of classes."
The 28-year-old contest is a fundraiser for Leap, a nonprofit formed in the wake of Proposition 13 to bring visual and performing art into schools. Various companies, typically in the construction industry, join with elementary schools to build the structures. The sand castle contest raised about $220,000 last year, a large portion of the organization's $550,000 annual budget.
Children participated as much as the adults in the early stages: the packing of sand and the carrying of water. But by noon, two hours in, many had petered out. Adults increasingly take over details as it reaches the end.
Several children said they loved it, but for varied reasons.
Castle builders can only use what they find on the beach. So Shakram Gafurov, 11, scavenged the sand for anything to add detail to George Peabody Elementary School's volcanoes and roller coaster. He found leis, whose petals became part of the lava flow.
"It was hard work," he said. "I like that people are working together."
Matthew Lee, 10, who also attends Peabody, said this was the one time of year he made it out to the beach.
"It was fun," he said, "because I got to get together with all my friends on the weekend."
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/08/BAL71LF8V6.DTL#ixzz1aLyoe1ov
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