Post 5: Cactus Pot

Much of my inspiration for the desert aesthetic flower pot comes from the clay flower pots that many people have used.

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I knew I wanted to make something out of Legos since I had an excess amount of Lego materials left over at my parents house from when I was young. However, I did not know what I wanted to make. When I went to look at my old Lego collection I saw a bunch of tan, brown, and light brown Lego bricks. This is where I got the idea for the desert aesthetic. When I randomly googled desert aesthetics, I saw many images of scenery from Utah and Arizona such as Arches National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Moab. These scenery images are very nice as they contain a variety of reds along with the brown of the desert. They also have some brush or cactus vegetation in each image. With these images I decided that I wanted to use my brown Legos to make a flower pot that will have a real cactus or other desert-like plant in the flower pot. This will give the desert aesthetic, as well as a naturalistic aesthetic since the pot will be desert themed and the plant is associated with nature. If the cactus pot uses the same desert color tones to simulate “clay” then it will look like a Lego version of a clay flower pot. 

As I started fabricating, some of my hopes to simulate the clay pot went away but new aesthetics formed. Since I had a variety of random Lego bricks I was upcycling from when I was young some of the geometry with the Legos didn’t really line up. This means I had to be careful with how I placed the Lego bricks to make sure I had enough material for a decent sized pot. The issue with this conservative approach is I built the cactus pot before I obtained a cactus and built the pot too small. After I got the cactus, I realized that it did not fit in the flower pot. Luckily, Legos are meant to be built, taken apart, and rebuilt. So I completely deconstructed the Legos and rebuilt them around the geometry of the plastic cactus pot that the cactus came in. As the Lego cactus pot began to take shape around the cactus I realized that it is hard to work with the different geometries. Legos are very rigid and grid-like while the cactus is organic and doesn’t really have an organization. This made it hard to get the Legos in the right dimensions while conserving the little amount of usable bricks I had. Due to this challenge, many overhanging parts started to appear that were Legos too big to fit in the spot I had allotted for them. While this wasn’t the original plan, it ended up making a new unorganized aesthetic to the project. These overhanging Lego brick features actually ended up being one of the most complimented and talked about features of the cactus pot in my design critique.

Functionally, the cactus pot was a success as it holds a cactus and that’s what I wanted it to do. Artistically, it’s not really what I wanted. There is a lot of mis organization and far from the color scheme I wanted to do. I think this just has to do with the limitations of material I had with my upcycle.

I think what’s next for this project is that I will probably give the cactus to someone else and move on. I don’t really think I can make it better unless I source more Legos and I want to move on to the bigger project in this class.