I hope it is not as obvious to you as it is to me, but I have been wholly un-inspirable this week. Was it the 3 day vacation? But I think this started before that. I am just a little frazzled, but this sparked my fancy like nothing has sparked me for about 10 days now — so maybe it will be the beginning of an end to the slump.
Toronto’s latest guerrilla street art project, which was organized by Sean Martindale and put on with a grant from Toronto FEAST, challenged artists to alter the cities crumbling planter boxes. The idea was to raise the stakes in our common environments. By directly engaging Toronto’s urban fabric the idea was to encourage more direct participation and interest in our shared public spaces. I think the is outcome fun, sweet, unpretentious and hopefully just the thing to inspire me out of my design doldrums.
images from the Torontoist, BlogTO and urban gardens.
I would stain the remaining concrete. Then enlarge the crack enough to mortar in a rounder rock, maybe a foot across, like nature interrupting the industrial box.
Maybe mix some pebble and blue green glass bits in the mortar. I wonder if you could make something that looks like water with pebble/glass bubbles in it burbling up out of the planter and down the side.
It would look cool to use those inset areas as portions of a graphic design. Maybe put maple leaf outlines in a different color in there?
Of course for the ones with soil room, trailing plants would be pretty, maybe with pieces of colored rope trailing out as well.
Or make the whole thing into a hobbit house, with doors and windows. That one with the big tree looks like it wants flying buttresses.