Rising up from its corner lot like a ship on a wave, this shipping container home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a stunning private residence made from sliced, diced and strategically reassembled cargo boxes.

The cut containers were flipped and reassembled to avoid waste, reusing various angled sections generated through diagonal slicing (images by Danny Bright). Moving through the home, the logic of these cuts becomes increasingly clear.

Designed by LOT-EK, a firm famous for its industrial-style containertecture, the corrugated facade is spliced with vertical windows along the sides. Along the front and back, container ends open up for larger views and terraced roof access — there are outdoor spaces at each level, given privacy thanks to the angled cuts. Below, those same cuts provide a natural opening for the building’s sunken entry, garage and cellar.

Social living, dining and kitchen spaces are on the first floor. The inside is also shaped by the slice angles, forming spaces like a media room with bleacher seating and a projector. Upper levels include bedrooms, play areas and other private spaces.

Acting out scenes from storybooks or animating real activities, these deceptively simple-looking, folded-paper toys leap, bounce, roll and hatch into action when played with.

Japanese designer Haruki Nakamura was inspired by the ancient art of kirigami, a variation on origami that involves cuts as well as folds, but takes it to the next level with his playful animals.

The specific behaviors of the toys often follow the natural reactions of a given animal, like an armadillo rolling itself up for protection when threatened.

Combining kirigami with karakuri, the art of mechanical puppets actived by touch, led him to these neat hybrid creatures that one can poke, prod, press or drop into action.

In some cases, the activities are innocent and entertaining, like a turtle popping into its shell or a chick hatching from an egg. Others are humorously sinister, showing wolves in sheep’s clothing or a tortoise being eaten by an alligator. For now, alas, these works are only available in Japan.

This holiday season brings fresh printer-compatible designs of low-poly skeletons, monsters, animals and more for the do-it-yourself costumer, all scaled to fit an adult or resizable for children.

Like a polygon mesh in 3D computer graphics (that has a relatively small number of polygons), these masks are leant a haunting effect unique to the digital age, looking otherworldly and surreal like low-resolution computer renderings.

Some models are more complex than others, involving sets of articulated parts that rotate on simple hinges or pivots, like the tail of a fish, trunk of an elephant or the hands of a dragon.

The key ingredients: a printer, some paper of applicable color, glue sticks, craft knife, tape, cardboard and an elastic headband. If you have more time than money, or simply enjoy the process, these models provide a great balance of personal work and creativity within a ready-made outline.

From their maker, Wintercroft on Etsy, who sells the plans online:  “The instructions and templates are designed to be quick and easy to follow. The finished masks are pretty robust due the their polygon construction and will survive the wildest of parties.

More on Steven Wintercroft: “By nature I am obsessively creative and starting making things as a kid with my granddad. I studied Art and design, then furniture studies and have been designing and building custom surfboards since I was a teenager. I’ve worked as a cabinet maker but have spent most of my time as a full time surfboard shaper. I believe that the urge to create is a fundamental part of being human and these masks provide an excuse to sit down, get out the scissors, tape and paint and make something” (via Colossal).

A children’s book with an interactive twist, Motion Silhouette engages readers through pop-up pieces that require lighting to animate shadow pictures on each page.

The idea is to add elements of manual animation that are necessarily subjective – each person will hold, turn and highlight the cutouts in different ways.

Secondary readers or viewers (young kids watching over parents’ shoulders) will also have their own unique experience each time.

Motion Silhouette is actually a sequel to another book, simply titled Silhouette (excerpts shown above), a work which similarly uses slightly less-developed pop-up pages to create a more basic multi-dimensional experience.

From its Japanese creators, Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima: “I will begin to talk about the story and illustrations shadow falls on top of the page overlap. In this work, you can enjoy the animation of shadow phantasmagoric by you move the light. Trees and become bigger and bigger, which aims to train a distant star. Story that changes depending on the page falling shadows, shadows move around the top of the page.”

Together, Hari & Deepti (Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker) turn sets of two-dimensional cutouts into vivid and haunting three-dimensional dioramas, often set in shadowy fantasy spaces.

Despite the darkness of their subject matter, in ordinary lighting conditions there is almost nothing to be seen of these pieces. The work waits in the shadows, so to speak, popping out when you turn out the lights and turn on the LEDs inside each individual light box.

Loosely analogous to a book, perhaps, the story plays out in the space between the pages, each one individually flat but, together with illumination, adding up to something more than the sum of its parts.

While most of their works are relatively small, a recent project challenged them to build at a much bigger scale, creating an entirely monstrous (pun intended) New York cityscape (shown below).

From the artists: “Paper is brutal in its simplicity as a medium. It demands the attention of the artist while it provides the softness they need to mold it in to something beautiful. It is playful, light, colorless and colorful. It is minimal and intricate. It reflects light, creates depth and illusions in a way that it takes the artist through a journey with limitless possibilities.”