Design Preview – Industrial Planter Fountain

Alternative aesthetics

For alternative aesthetics I explored two aesthetics that I felt juxtaposed the natural aesthetic in the industrial and futuristic aesthetics. The first one I explored was the futuristic aesthetic, which can be characterized by the basis of designs in style looking as though they can from some hypothetical future. This is often seen by the prolific use of curved shapes, chrome metals, and white and blue hues. An idea I had for this aesthetic was to create a floating fountain, where the piping for the fountain is hidden by the water itself. This led me to researching futuristic floating fountains, where I found the Nine Floating Fountains in Osaka, Japan. I thought this design was cool, however I didn’t feel as though it would fit with the planter idea, as flowers are not usually seen in the futuristic aesthetic. I thought it could be cool to instead replace the flowers/plants with swooping metallic sculptures seen in futuristic artwork. While I thought this could be an interesting project, I still wanted to retain the functionality of the planter. I then began brainstorming about how this artifact may look in the industrial aesthetic. This is the obvious opposite aesthetic to naturalistic, as works in this style aim to mimic industrial spaces such as factories. When researching industrial fountains and planters, I was disappointed as most of them were just metal cubes or other basic shapes. However I thought back to one of my favorite childhood movies in WALL-E, where a single flower is found in a landfill. This gave me the idea to think about this artifact in a more artistic sense rather than a functional one. My idea was to shroud the fountain feature in some duct pipes, to simulate water dripping from an old air vent. This water would then fall onto a base that looks like a broken sidewalk, with flowers growing out of the cracks. I really liked this idea and so I think this will be the angle I will pursue. However, I am still considering the initial naturalistic design as I think it would be the easier way to have appropriate spaces to plant in. Another consideration for this design is how to construct the concrete sidewalk without making the artifact insanely heavy. Right now my idea is to use plaster, but I do worry about both the durability and waterproofness of this material.

Fabrication Process

As stated before the fountain aspect of this project will be purchased off of Amazon, so I don’t believe this will require much fabrication apart from assembly. For the base I think that I will use either plastic, metal, or possibly concrete to construct. I am comfortable with working with all of these materials, so I believe that optimizing cost to durability would be the best bet. As I am planning on the industrial aesthetic as of now, the air duct covering would just be purchased from a hardware store. To achieve the broken sidewalk, I think either plaster or a thin layer of concrete would work. While I am familiar with concrete, I have not worked with plaster before. I plan to research this process by perusing the hardware store to see what options they have, and then watching YouTube videos on how to work with plaster. Another consideration with the bottom watering is how to keep the soil in place. Again I will use YouTube and Google to find the best way. I think that a combination of landscape fabric with a rock substrate would work well, but I believe this also is dependent upon what plants I use. This leads me into the final step, where I will have to research which plants would work best in this system. I want to have a variety of plants but need to make sure they require similar climates, watering, and sunlight. Finally, I will need to consider how this artifact will change with time. Whether that is weathering to the air duct and sidewalk, or how the plants will fair with time, both with size and lifetime.