Brooklyn, NYC

Our new friend PosterChild, the legendary and prolific Toronto street artist, just sent us these shots of a fresh planter he installed while in Williamsburg Brooklyn, NYC. We're excited that he's helping us spread the project.

Note that PosterChild used a nice alternative pocket technique, where he used the triangular cut, but wrapped it out and forward, instead off back and in to form a cone.

Thanks again for bringing the project to NYC! If anyone else wants to make some planters, we'd love to see your photos.

I'm still in BC, where my internet access is sporadic, so appologies if we don't respond immediately to any emails etc... There might be a delay, but we hope to post some more updates while I'm here on the West coast anyway. Eric has still been putting up new planters in Toronto too.

Sean

Rained out

Our plans for new planters over the last few days were thwarted by a series of torrential downpours. Those of you living in Toronto will understand. We normally don’t mind a little rain, but the recent heavy thundershowers have certainly slowed us down.

Water usually helps the plants, and our previous planters were strong enough to survive a deluge or two. However, the process of installing doesn’t go very well when the posters are soggy. Handling razor blades on slippery surfaces isn’t necessarily the best set-up either… At least it gave us a chance to begin fleshing out some of our other ideas (more on these later).

We were going to plant a few more tonight, but I’m still getting ready to head off to BC for three weeks bright and early tomorrow morning. Might give me an opportunity to do some planting in Vancouver! One of us will still be here, so keep looking out for new planters around Toronto.

More Thank Yous...

Just wanted to say how much we appreciate all the encouraging feedback we continue to receive. Thank you to those of you that have shown your support here on the blog and on other sites. A warm welcome to those who are following our feed! Also, thank you to everyone who has blogged or tweeted about the project on their own sites. We noticed that the project was up on the popular notcot site (link below) yesterday.

Again, we apologize for not having more updates and photos yet - we've both been insanely busy. Look out for more online here in the future, and keep your eyes open for new planters around the city. If any of you make your own, we'd love to hear about it and post your pictures! Please remember that we can't take responsibility for the actions of anyone else, so use your best judgment if you want to participate.

Hope you're all having a great weekend!

http://www.notcot.org/post/23561/

Wooster!

Big thank you to Marc and Sara Schiller from the Wooster Collective, everyone's favorite street art blog, for featuring our project today. Thank you again to David Topping and Michael Chrisman from the torontoist for posting the original article yesterday.

Links

We'll be posting more information and photos soon, but in the meantime you can check out the links to spacing magazine and torontoist below. We really appreciate all your interest and great photos!

http://torontoist.com/2009/07/green_sleeves.php

http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/07/15/poster-pocket-plants-revisited/

http://spacingmontreal.ca/2009/07/07/toronto-tuesday-pocket-plants-creative-class-the-strike-persists/

http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/07/06/poster-pocket-plants/

Torontoist!

Thank you again to David Topping and Michael Chrisman over at the torontoist for the article and photos today and for coming out to see us at a ridiculously early hour on Sunday. Check out the link below.

http://torontoist.com/2009/07/green_sleeves.php

Spadina Post 09.07.10

-- This one was interesting and came at the spur of the moment--I always wanted to do something on the posts and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. The spadina post was our first collab. and all credit to Sean for making it a more graphically and functionally interesting object. I'm a pretty chaotic guy myself so I was just going to hack and slash planters in random ways across the post. But I think Sean found a very elegant solution in the cork screw graphic and triangular plant form... also thanks to Sean for getting up super early even after a night of beers to pump this bad boy out...

I think placing these in high traffic area is also a good way to spread the ideas around.

much, much better photos to come...

Some previous planters

These were done in bits and pieces to get comfortable with the planter system... done around bathurst and queen. There were loads more but they got taken down quicker than I could come back and take photos of them.

Templates

Both templates in downloadable .pdf here:

here (the triangle)
here (the slot box)

I think what these templates suggest is that creating the planters is not a very hard thing to do.

The geometry is exceedingly simple (the easiest one being a triangle) and all you really need is an exacto knife(i like Olfa the best--that's the extent of my marketing schill...).

So really, posting the planter templates is showing the real potential of the urban environment and the simplicity of a good 'urban hack.'

If you've developed your own awesome shapes and what not, give us a shout (info@at-aw.com) and we'll post them up! Do remember, though, that we interpret this project as part of a larger theme of "ideas for the city" rather than a "designer object"(as in don't be a marketing dick and use it to make a quick buck...more on this later) so everything that gets posted to the site will be considered 'non-commercial and remixable' a la the creative commons licence found here.

--eric 090716

spacing! (x3)

Thank you to Jake Shabas over at spacing.ca for the great posts about our project. We're both already readers of the Toronto's spacing magazine and blog, so it's really encouraging to see the interest. Also, thank you once more to Yvonne Bambrick, executive director of the Toronto Cyclists Union, for taking the fantastic photos.

http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/07/15/poster-pocket-plants-revisited/

http://spacingmontreal.ca/2009/07/07/toronto-tuesday-pocket-plants-creative-class-the-strike-persists/

http://spacing.ca/wire/2009/07/06/poster-pocket-plants/

More updates on the way soon - we promise.

beginnings...

so me and sean thought it would be a good idea to start a blog to thoroughly document our work through out the summer. it's nice that people are interested in the work--there's going to be a shitload more coming around town so watch out for them!. here are the initial words, taken from www.at-aw.com . templates can be downloaded soon as we figure out this new fangled internet thing...

A further addition to the Natural Urban Interventions. I see this as an improntu architectural green wall system(or a satire of one) that is cut out of existing poster spaces. Some may call it a little guerrila gardening but I see this more as an 'Urban Hack' in its ability to jam an urban system and provoke reaction.

Anyhow, I like the idea so much and it seems pretty fun to do, that we're tossing the design out 'there' for free for you to use. Go to town and make your city awesome by clicking and opening the .pdf here. For such a craaaazzzzyyy idea, the planter is actually pretty simple folding geometry and I'm confident that you can develop much more refined and complex planter systems and shapes. Such as:

Kudos to artist Sean Martindale for the help and colloborative talk on the Spadina post. He diligently developed it from my random, chaotic cutout concept into a more refined corkscrew pattern and, along that line, established a more minimal planter cutout through the use of conical geometry. Plus, the dude got up at 5am on a Sunday to help me out with the planting! Dude is super cool--link to his website when it's up.

-eric 090714