What would architecture look like if it had no beginning or end, no ground floor as starting point nor rooftop terminus? Artist Vasco Mourao explores exactly that question in his series Ouroboros, so named after the mythical dragon/serpent forever eating its own tail.

The Barcelona-based artist (an architect by training) illustrates his impossible-sounding seems on curved and angular cuts of plywood shaped into loops.

His work indirectly addresses a key transition point in the history of architecture as well — a time when concrete, steel and glass were first combined to make taller structure possible but before the Modernists rendered these buildings sleek and simple.

Like early skyscrapers (featuring stretched Gothic decor and wood-inspired details), his designs extrapolate conventional materials and decorative approaches skyward. Their aesthetic is also reminiscent of places like Kowloon Walled City, where densification drove particularly strange connections between different structures.

Meanwhile, Mourao also draws other cityscapes on different surfaces as well, from large-scale surrealistic murals to the bottoms of skateboards, often reprising similar themes of infinity-evoking architecture.

A new model of 3D sculpture-drawing tool from WobbleWorks operates using extrusion like its predecessor, but has expanded to allow users to print with new materials like wood, copper, bronze, nylon and polycarbonate.

Users can draw shapes in the air which solidify as the extruded materials cool to create complex works of art and design.

Each of the materials in the new range of offerings is combined with plastic to form a filament that can be heated and shaped as before. Now, however, these works can be modified post-production per the new material line (e.g. wood sanded or bronze polished).

The new device features dials to control temperature and speed as well as a fan for cooling materials as they are deployed for rapid setting. Housed in a carbon fiber shell, the device can be used to draw scale models, household decor, creative crafts and fun sculptures. The gadget also comes with a portable battery pack.

“When we started the 3Doodler journey back in 2013, we had world-leading architects telling us ‘I want to do this’,” said WobbleWorks co-founder and CEO Maxwell Bogue, referring to  “a quick wave of the pen in the air, with plastic solidifying in its wake. With new materials like polycarbonate, that dream is a reality.” In the future, technologies like this could be employed in medical and other fields as well.

A new pen aims to take art to the next level, letting users scan colors from their surroundings and deploy them, all via a single gadget. The Cronzy can be employed to scan plants, walls, cloth, and other surfaces; a connected app can then save, collect and use these colors on the go.

The scan-and-draw concept has been around for years, but getting this versatility and complexity into a single small and portable device has been a challenge. Some tools on the market can deploy present mixes and others can scan natural and built environments. This one taps your smartphone’s computing power to speed up and scanning and combines it with a cartridge-enabled drawing device.

The scanned colors, tints and shades are converted into CYMK (matching the swappable cartridges) or RGB formats so they can be deconstructed, remixed or adjusted according to an artist’s whim on a connected device. The gadgets comes with a portable case and charger and works with Android, IOS and Windows phones.

Naturally, they can be shared with other users as well this way, allowing people to create and distribute custom palettes for further use. For now, the device is in crowdfunding, but its makers aim to have a consumer model on the market by early 2017. If the prototypes are any indicator, this could be the best one-stop digital-plus-physical drawing tool to date.

A group of students from the University of Tokyo have created the world’s first work of 3D pen-drawn architecture, extruding thermoplastic filament to generate a structurally-stable arch installation.

A digital tracking system helped builders connect rods with extruded supports, generating a lattice-like system of interconnected trusses (resulting in a kind of lightweight, smaller-scale space frame). The combination of rigid rods and fluid connectors helps the whole structural network, providing tension as well as compression capabilities.

The handheld device enabling the extrusions operates much like a hot glue gun or static 3D printer, heating the constituent material and making it malleable before it hardens upon deployment. Unlike large-scale printers, this approach enables minute on-site work by anyone trained to use the machine, reducing costs and complexity.

“Technology has traditionally been used to automate and replace human labour,” design team member Kevin Clement, said in an interview with Dezeen. “The issue with this approach is that it fails to take advantage of human intuition during fabrication. We believe our approach can bridge the current dichotomy between machine and human-made production.”

Five years ago it was an mind-boggling design concept, but today the idea color-changing pen has morphed into a working prototype that draws colors from objects and surfaces, natural or artificial, then lets you use them in all kinds of creative ways. This real-world version can make over 16,000,000 different tones and store over 100,000 unique colors in its memory.

Imagine the possibilities of Scribble, both artistic and practical: instead of trying to mix just the right paints to capture a landscape or replicate a color scheme for your interior remodel, you can scan the actual colors of environments and use those. Users can then upload, store, tag and share their color picks for future applications.

The Color Picker by Jinsun Park (shown below) was a purely conceptual design model at the time, but operated on the same principle (like the Photoshop eyedropper tool), made to contain a series of inks that (much like a printer) would mix in the appropriate amounts, reproducing colors scanned into it. This new variant on the device also converts the colors into other formats (like binary, decimal and hexadecimal) that can be saved and deployed for digital art. And with cartridge refills, you will never need to buy another color of pen.

The applications are myriad: “For the colour blind, kids, interior decorators, homeowners, teachers, artists, photographers, designers and students, the Scribble colour picker pen will make copying an exact colour, any colour from any object, an absolute breeze. With Scribble you can scan, match or compare colours, draw on paper or your mobile device.” Of course, you don’t have to scan in a new color – you can always mix your own on the computer and input that preferred tone too.

Here is the executive summary from the company: “Scribble is the first coloring device of its kind that can take the world of color around you and transfer it directly to either paper or your favourite mobile device. Simple hold the Scribble’s scanner up to any color, like on a wall, a book or magazine, a painting or even a child’s toy and within a second or two that color is stored in Scribble’s internal memory. You can now instantly draw on paper with the Scribble Ink Pen or draw on a digital device like an iPad or Wacom Tablet with the Scribble Stylus Pen.”