This is another 3D model to be printed and used as a planter. I was prompted recently to create it and order one for myself because someone gave me a new plant as a gift.

It’s a stout, simple human figure, hollowed out, with an open head and drainage holes at the bottom. Originally, I planned to give the figure a comically proud pose, standing with hands on hips, with the plant resembling hair as it grew out of its head. But then I thought the plants-as-hair gimmick was just too common (Chia Pets, for example) to justify the time I would spend creating it.

I decided instead to make it so that the plant could symbolize a thought, specifically a creative idea. I arranged the figure in a “relaxed thinking” pose, with its head turned upward to suggest free imagination and synthesis, rather than downward, which I felt suggested constrained, even slightly troubled, analysis and calculation (that is how I feel about The Thinker, anyway).

Grand ideas don’t burst into existence like flashes of light. They advance slowly, upward and outward from the minds of their architects, always toward the ideal, never arriving but ever growing.

Order the Architect planter from the Synapse shop at Shapeways.com