Rendering luxury-class house designs accessible to the public is just part of the beauty of Paperhouses, an endeavor to raise the quality of free house plans and and explore the potentials for architecture to be as open as technology can be. As with Wikihouse, anyone is welcome to download and begin construction on any of the uploaded homes without paying an architect fee.

The latest submission to Paperhouses is a houseboat by Carl Turner Architects composed of prefab parts and design to move freely in narrow urban waterways and allow for expansion in ever-more-crowded European capitals.

As with other homes in the database, this one is intended to be flexible, able to be adapted to different conditions and clients. While intended to float, the modular construction allows the design to be built on land with equal ease while an adjustable pallet of colors and materials allow it to be individualized by each builder or owner.

Our Private Sky by Florian Busch Architects is part of the same initiative but approaches modularity through the idea of privacy and views. The primary focus of the structure is upward, while variable windows can be added, moved or removed depending upon its context.

The Module House by Tatiana Bilbao is based on series of same-sized blocks that can be arranged and oriented depending on the layout of a site and desired directions relative to the sun, featuring concrete walls and cantilevers to balance daylight and shade.

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Open Source Homes 6 Free Plans Put High End Design In Reach

Applied to anything from the surface of your smartphone to the the sides of a skyscraper, the possible uses of this innovation for everyday surfaces are incredibly wide-ranging.

Developed by a team of chemical engineers and material scientists from the University of Michigan’s School of Engineering, this solar concentrator leaves a clear surface while collecting energy.

Unlike similar previous attempts, this project avoids coloration and distortion entirely behind: “The solar harvesting system uses small organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb specific nonvisible wavelengths of sunlight.” The goal now is to iterate on the design, continuing to improve its efficiency, scale and cost-effectiveness toward eventual mass-production on surfaces both small and large.

Operating out of the normally-visible spectrum, they look effectively transparent to a human viewer. The captured power is redirected to and collected at the edges of the panel, out of sight and out of mind, leaving in the center a transparent surface that could cover (or even replace) windows on a building or the surfaces of smartphones. The goal is for energy generation to disappear entirely – in the near future, you might never know that homes and phones are creating, collecting and deploying clean power passively all around you.

Completed by a robot programmed to extrude material in midair, the world’s first fully 3D-printed metal furniture shows off a fresh range of possibilities for creating intricate structures and complex shapes on demand.

Employing Autodesk and an MX3D machine, Dutch designer Joris Laarman created the Dragon Bench (above) and other pieces (below) that illustrate the rich potential of metals using additives to harden as they are deployed.

With this “industrial robot [and] advanced welding machine we are able to print with metals, such as steel, stainless steel, aluminium, bronze or copper without the need for support-structures. By adding small amounts of molten metal at a time, we are able to print lines [horizontal, vertical and spiral] in mid air. The combination robot/welding is driven by different types of software that work closely together. This will eventually have to end up in a user friendly interface that allows the user to print directly from CAD.”

Within this series, currently on display at Friedman Benda gallery in New York City, are a set of organic (also 3D-printed) polyurethane chairs and table. Puzzle-piece parts are made first, costing around $50 – the components are assembled into a finished whole. The plans for these are also going to be made available online as free resources for anyone who wants to make their own – an easier, less material-dependent entry point for someone without access to their own metal-printing robot (at least as of yet).

The potential of this technology extends well beyond stand-alone objects – components for cars, buildings or other infrastructure could be generated using the same machines and techniques. Meanwhile, when it comes one-off custom works of either art or design, three-dimensional complexity is suddenly a much lower hurdle to overcome.

Donated boxes of right-sized clothing can be a boon for those who cannot afford another choice, but this clever approach empowers people in need to choose their own apparel.

The Street Store assistants set out flat-pack cardboard hangars, signs and stands along sidewalks and fences, encouraging people to drop off clothing. Volunteers also help passerby in need package what what they find, and those with something to give find a place to put their donations.

Though the project was started in Cape Town, South Africa, as a collaboration between M&C Saatchi Abel and the Haven Night Shelter Welfare Organisation, it is offered as open-source to applicants from around the world who wish to use the files and create their own  regional variant.

The open-air approach makes everything more accessible for both donating and recipient parties; it also renders indoor spaces and infrastructure redundant, enabling pop-ups to happen in various public spaces.

As for the first day’s effort in the project’s original city: “Over 1,000 homeless people visited our store that day. Each put together an outfit that they wanted. An outfit, that for many, was the first they had ever been able to choose for themselves.”

If you have ever zoomed out in Google Maps (or Mapquest, Yahoo or Bing), you may have been surprised find your field of view relatively unclouded by inclement weather patterns, yet marred by strange and inconsistent seasons. Instead of a continuous satellite view, you see an apparent patchwork quilt of misfit images, incoherently stitched together.

MapBox (which powers FourSquare among other services) is on a mission to make satellite images not only more beautiful but also more consistent and comprehensible. Their task begins with eliminating blurry landscapes, strange seams and the surreal endless summer you see on other aerial images of the globe, but the potential scope of the project goes far beyond that as well.

Talking to Wired, Charlie Loyd describes how the company is sifting through data from Terra and Aqua, two orbiting NASA satellites, to solve this problem pixel by pixel: “For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012. This amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.”

The industry paradigm is to combine parts of images representing the clearest available shots, but the result can create a clash of color from various seasons. Simply overlapping all of the different possibilities creates a mess of indistinct brown, which is not terribly attractive or useful either. Thus a middle road was found: stacking the images, sorting them by cloudiness, selecting pixels from each picture and filtering around peak growth periods. The result is a consistent yet naturally texture-rich whole both synthetic in composition yet ultimately organic in origin at the same time.

The goal for now is to create a single seamless atlas that wraps the world, accurately (but with an eye towards aesthetics) reflecting what the planet actually looks like from above while also being useful in real-life mapping. Future potential iterations, however, could evolve beyond just looking and working best in traditional contexts: “If you do a web search for, say, infrared remote sensing, you’ll get an idea of the richness of possibilities, and you can start to imagine the cross-cutting inquiries that these large, open archives of multi-spectral satellite data enable,” writes Loyd. “Glaciers, wildfires, crops, droughts and floods, cities and forests, surface temperature, plankton blooms, seasonal dynamics, even smog –- it’s all there. It just needs a little work to see clearly.”