The competition in full swing

Unique towers and bridges grew up at SPbGASU in two days. Their authors are participants in the annual international competition “Pasta Builder”. Winners and runners-up in two categories were announced on 12 April.

Anton Gaido and Margarita Gurieva summing up the results of the competition

“This event of our university becomes more popular every year and expands cooperation with other universities. To an incompetent person, building with pasta may seem like a purely playful activity. In fact, all the basic principles of construction are applied in this process: the structures created must be stable and durable, withstand a certain load, and have an attractive appearance. Resource saving is achieved through the use of a minimum amount of materials,” explained Anton Gaido, Dean of the SPbGASU Faculty of Civil Engineering.

As the main materials for the construction of structures, the participating teams were given 0.5 kilograms of sculptural plasticine and 1.6 kilograms of pasta. The towers were erected on a special base, and tables were used to support the bridges. Four hours were allowed for the construction of each structure.

The representative of the competition organizer, SPbGASU senior lecturer Margarita Gurieva clarified that the pasta structure built in the evening had to be fully preserved until the next morning.

“The architectural expressiveness of the structures, their stability and rigidity were assessed, and the rational use of material, the height of the towers without a spire, and the length of the span of bridges between the outer supports were taken into account. In addition, the bridges had to include a road surface or a pedestrian path,” explained Margarita Gurieva.

Participants at work

The competition was held in two stages: in the qualifying round, a commission remotely identified the best anonymous sketches for further participation. On the first day, the competition participants built towers. Twenty of the 42 entered teams reached the finals. A representative of one of the SPbGASU teams, a fourth-year student of the Faculty of Architecture, Aleksandr Grekov, said that the guys had previously developed a drawing and a 3D model of the structure, calculated the length of each pasta tube down to millimeters, and even conducted preliminary tests on their strength. But they didn’t set the final height: they decided that everything here would depend on the remaining time.

A fourth-year student at the SPbGASU Faculty of Architecture, a member of another team, Karina Titova, said that in preparation for the competition, the team built a tower according to its calculations in order to test in practice the distribution of the load and the stability of the structure. They modeled several types of tower bases in electronic format and chose the optimal one. The height was planned to be at least 2.5 meters.

One of the works

Unfortunately, many of the structures did not survive until the morning, but the commission still had the opportunity to choose the best of the best. First place was shared by the team “Plasticine of the Rings” of the M.V. Lomonosov Northern (Arctic) Federal University (Azizbek Asrorov, Sergey Andreev, Aleksey Krasikov, Daria Zakhozhay, Daria Kokina) and the team “Durum Wheat” of SPbGASU (Artem Fazylov, Anastasia Yuryeva, Nikolay Shavrygin, Hasan Abasov Mikhail Palkin). Third place went to the TamADA team of Tver State Technical University.

Master's student of the Department of Highways and Foundation Engineering of Tver State Technical University Ilya Korotkov said that initially his team consisted of five people, but due to circumstances, three could not come.

“Last year the team came in full force, but failed to enter the top three. This year we were determined to win because we had gained experience in such an event. We decided that two people would be enough to complete the tasks of the competition. Moreover, team member Vladislav Belyaev and I share the same engineering views; we do not have any conflicting situations in the construction processes. Thanks to this, as well as experience and well-coordinated work, we were able to successfully implement the planned projects. Although during the construction process, due to the different sizes of the pasta, we had to re-conduct small full-scale stability tests and derive the optimal design for future structures,” said Ilya.

In the “Bridges” category, 10 out of 37 teams reached the finals. The winner was the “Shukhovtsy” team from the Belgorod State Technological University named after V. G. Shukhov (Ivan Usik, Danila Miroshnikov, Ivan Pakhomov, Anna Migulina and Aleksandr Barelsky). They built a bridge about three meters long. The second place was taken by the “TamADA” team of the Tver State Technical University, the third place was taken by the “BridgeArt” team of the Tyumen Industrial University.

Master's student in the field of "Industrial and civil engineering: theory and design of buildings and structures" of BSTU named after V. G. Shukhov Aleksandr Barelsky is confident that it was possible to achieve victory due to the concept of the bridge: to build a long bridge, it is not necessary to build something massive: it is enough to connect two cables and build high-quality supports. “Coordinated teamwork and camaraderie also led to victory. Without these two components, success is also impossible. We had an idea to make the bridge longer, but decided it wasn't worth the risk. We’re glad we made the right decision,” says Aleksandr.

The competition was also attended by a joint team from the Russian Biotechnological University (Moscow) and the Don State Technical University (Rostov-on-Don); joint team of the Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University and the St Petersburg Academy of Arts and Industry named after A. L. Stieglitz; teams of the St Petersburg State Electrotechnical University "LETI", St Petersburg State University of Transport, St Petersburg State University, as well as the team of secondary school No. 69 of St Petersburg.