What – you haven’t started thinking about what you want for Christmas yet?

I want a 3D printer.  3D is not some passing fad.  Go to the Noel Leeming website and it’s a category under printers :-)  You can get one for $2K.  They were advertising them in the junk mail we got last week.  But the 3D printer I want is this one – it builds houses (in 24 hours) using fast drying concrete.  Watch the YouTube video if you want to see how it works.  Imagine what you could build if you weren’t constrained……..

It was the marble counter top and then the floor that caught my eye in this kitchen.  It’s in an apartment in Paris designed by Joseph Dirand.  Though as I admired more of his work I realised how staged everything looks – do people live in these homes places? I’m not sure, but I’d like to give it a go.  More photos of this particular apartment can be found on Yatzer

Photos of this house (extension designed by Christopher Megowan) can be found here, but it wasn’t until I saw the above diagram that I actually realised what they had done.  A bit like looking at those ‘spot the difference’ pictures and not noticing anything….  You might also like the aqueduct guttering – again, not immediately obvious.  Here is an animation of the roof being moved from one side to the other.

This house is in Melbourne – apparently the weather is fickle :-)

Would it look this stylish and be as interesting?  Apparently in 1942, the owner of this apartment in Paris left her home for Southern France, to escape a Nazi raid.  She never returned to the apartment and it remain untouched until her death three years ago, when the owner‘s executor sent a team to investigate her past home – it’s a voyeuristic look at another time and another life.

Serendipitously in the past week I’ve stumbled across two great websites.  The first belongs to Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam dedicated to arts and history.  What’s exciting?  It’s RIJKS Studio – they’ve put 125,000 high resolution images online.  And they’ve done so with the deliberate desire for us to download, print, and create something new – cool!!  Steal like an artist anyone?

I love the Auckland Art Gallery (2013 World Building of the Year) and when I went online this week to check their opening hours I found a link to Find New Zealand Artists – an information portal that makes it easier to locate information on New Zealand artists past and present (with access to the databases of 12 libraries, published sources and art society records) – cool.  It’ll be super cool when all the information is also online!!

I read today (via Facebook) a couple of my sister’s new year resolutions.  Mine are still germinating….  Anyway, I did make a resolution to re-read Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon, and today was the perfect day to do it.  My original post about this book was in November 2012, but it was only today I subscribed to Austin’s weekly email.

Want to get a taste of what Austin has to say?  Be inspired – watch the clip of him talking at TEDxKC in 2012 (and happy new year!)