A Golden Vessel

The idea for this plant vessel stemmed from the forms of this handwarmer mug, and the golden spiral. I first made a digital 3D model which was very accurate, but the foam molding process turned out to be not so accurate. The idea is that a plant would go in the pouch-like opening as seen in the mug, but the overall form would be of the spiral. This system could be tacked to form a column, and each piece could be twisted to a desired location:

The foam mold was made in layers and then stacked and taped: The concrete mix was then poured into the mold and let to set overnight. The concrete mix I used was one part Portland cement to three and a half parts sand.

Here is the final vessel prototype:

A few things to note:

I forgot pretty much the most important part of the vessel, the bottom piece that holds the dirt in! There should also be a top piece as well. Next time though! Also, next time I would make the cement mixture with less sand and more cement. This mix was a bit too crumbly.

This is my make shift modular planting unit. It is meant to hold dirt in the 1 inch well space and a plant. There is a drainage hole in the bottom so the water can drip into the next lower unit. The offset on the back half of the block where the modular unit stack into each other with a tongue and grove.

This first assignment was to construct a mold out of supplied rigid foam core. Next was to mix our own concrete to pour into our mold. The concrete mixture I made was a 1:4 ratio of cement to sand. This proved to be very crumbly because there was not enough cement added. More cement would have given the mix more structural integrity and make it less crumby.

Other issues:

1. The final piece could not stand on it's own because it was back heavy
2. There were some spaces I could not remove the foam core because it was too small a space