Home, Hearth and Form

Geometry

General Mills building. Minneapolis, Minnesota

Pop of color. San Francisco, California.

3D Printing a Building!

We seem to be moving toward being able to 3D print a full-size structure (via DVice).

As always when handworked artifacts become mechanically produced, there are impacts on jobs, crafts, culture, and the human spirit–some negative, some positive–and it’s worth thinking about the general trajectory of our species, but this is a pretty bangin’ application of 3D printing.

TEDx presenter Behrokh Khoshnevis’ presentation gets really exciting at 6:50 when he shows a actual machine building a wall and then at 9:10, when he talks about building structures on the moon!!

Sparks

A quasi-random sampling of interesting tidbits…

Seth Godin’s inspiring piece on blowing up constraints – Getting Unstuck: Solving the Perfect Problem [via Seth’s Blog]

The way to solve the perfect problem is to make it imperfect. Don’t just bend one of the constraints, eliminate it. Shut down the factory. Walk away from the job. Change your product completely. Ignore the board.

San Francisco architects blow up a constraint by mathematically rethinking the bay window – Random Acts of Architecture [via Metropolis]

The San Francisco planning code encourages Victorian bay windows, but when you look at it closely, there’s nothing that actually states that you have to create a bay window…It just describes this little chamfered envelope. In the zeitgeist that architects live in, where we’re always constrained by planning codes, we found ourselves emboldened by the realization that it could be crazy! So we deliberately misread it as a mathematical description, which allowed for infinite possibilities.

The ever-increasing hegemony of the smartphone – Bank of America & Visa test smartphone as credit card system [via Fast Company]

Amazing cylindrical dioramas from artist Anastassia Elias – See the world inside a toilet paper roll [via Likecool]

Continuum shares their creative process – Open for Branding: Design Museum Boston project [via Core77]

Shyness kills? – Research study links shyness to heart problems [via BBC News]

And finally, my favorite of the week – All Ducks are Wearing Dog Masks! – Be forewarned: you’ll never look at a duck the same way after you look at this. Ducks’ Bills: You Never Even Noticed [via i am bored]

Sparks (formerly “Tidbits”)

Beautiful mistakes – Glitch art [via REfeeded]

A preview of coming attractions – We hosted alexandluke.com in our Airstream this week via airbnb, and they were kind enough to sit down with me for an interview. Next week, I’ll be posting a more in-depth piece on their unique exploration of traveling, social media, and the borders between online and offline worlds.

A novel product solution for a basic need – The Keyport [via engadget]

Rapid development – 72-hour urban action architecture contest [via pruned]

A really fun step programming musical instrument for the iPhone (you will instantly be making music with this!) – The Beatwave app [via Theresa]

An incredible graffiti animation – Big Bang Boom