No ladders are required to get all the way to the top of this floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in a Japanese home, built into a specially designed oblique exterior wall for both easy access and earthquake resistance. Shinsuke Fujii Architects rose to the challenge of a tight lot with a smart design that uses a high ceiling, split levels and climbable surfaces to make the best possible use of every square inch of space.

First of all, that wall. From the outside of the home, you can see that the neighboring home on the right is awfully close, and taking up the maximum amount of living space on the lot would have been a tight fit. The architects leaned this wall of the home toward the neighbor at the top, leaving a wide space at the base for the front entrance, which is protected from rain. There are no windows on this side, eliminating privacy concerns that would normally arise from being right across from each other. The home is also perched over a small carport that’s sized just right for the client’s compact car.

Inside, this angle creates the perfect surface for a super-tall bookshelf that’s easy to climb, making it possible to use the entire wall for storage. Plus, the grid of the bookshelf makes the wall more structurally stable, and the bookshelf won’t collapse onto the interior in the event of a quake. Books, magazines and storage boxes easily slot into the deep niches while the extra-wide shelves double as steps.

Stairs lead from the bookshelf up to a lofted living area, which gazes out onto views of the city rather than the neighboring houses. An outdoor terrace doubles as a giant skylight, and the ceiling of the kitchen below becomes a surface for a table, with additional storage set into the wall. It’s a great example of thinking outside the box to create a home that feels spacious, airy, private and well-lit without sacrificing storage space, even on a tiny urban parcel.

Ready or not, the 3D-printed future is coming, and the first examples are already arriving in cities around the world in the form of office buildings, small houses, public furniture, public art and self-driving buses. Restaurants that squirt your meals into intricate shapes through a 3D printer will likely proliferate, and before long, this tech revolution is expected to take over all sorts of urban construction processes, like building roads and bridges. 3D printing requires far less labor than other building processes, of course, something that makes a lot of people nervous about the future of jobs. But it’s also cheaper, more sustainable, and results in far more complex, ornamental structures.

Public Furniture: 3D-Printed Benches Made of Trash Bags

‘Print Your City!’ is a new initiative by Rotterdam-based research and design studio ‘The New Raw’ transforming plastic waste into urban furniture with 3D printing. The ‘XXX Bench’ is a double-sided rocking chair seating two to four people who have to use equilibrium to balance the seat. Each one weights about 110 pounds, is made from recycled plastic pellets from municipal plastic waste or flakes from ground recycled products, and is 100% recyclable itself.

Public Art: Giant Sculptural Sundials

3D printing will likely invade urban environments in the form of large-scale public art before we see a whole lot of architecture and infrastructure. This giant sundial taking the form of a flowering fan is one example. Made by design group ‘prescription’ in conjunction with Arup, the geometry of the structure is optimized using specific solar data from any world location to give it a unique form wherever it’s constructed. It’s 3D printed from strong, flexible plastic, and the design is 100% scalable.

Office Buildings: ‘Office of the Future’ in Dubai

Dubai’s ‘Office of the Future’ is the world’s first 3D-printed office building, created layer-by-layer using a special cement mixture in just 17 days at a cost of just $140,000. Only one employee was needed to monitor the printer at any given time, while seven other employees installed the building components onsite along with electricians and specialists. The 3D printer used for the project is pretty remarkable itself, measuring 20 feet high, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide.

Restaurants: ‘Food Ink’ 3D-Printed Meals

While the building itself is not 3D printed, the food inside ‘Food Ink’ is. This pop-up restaurant uses 3D printers to create dishes like pizza, hummus, chocolate mousse and other foods that can be made with printed pastes to create culinary sculptures.The project is “putting to work most innovative technologies, like 3D-printing and augmented reality, in order to elaborate the most exquisite interactive edible experience.” How long will it be before this is a common practice in many restaurants?

Transportation: Autonomous 3D-Printed Bus

This boxy, strange looking bus by Local Motors debuted in Washington D.C. in 2016, giving autonomous rides at the company’s introductory event. The driverless, 3D-printed ‘Olli’ has 12 seats and is powered by IBM Watson’s Internet of Things for Automotive technology, a car-focused cognitive learning platform. “Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” says Local Motors. “Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we’ve been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future.”

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3d Print The World 12 Ways This Technology Will Soon Flourish In Cities

Apartment buildings are typically so hideous, it’s kind of exhausting. A structure with some measure of character gets knocked down in a prominent spot and before locals dare to dream that something cool might go up in its place, there’s another boring old block of apartments (or worse yet, condos) adding to the dull architectural noise of the city. Of course, it’s all subjective. You could argue, fairly enough, that pretty much all new apartment buildings are ugly, and that trying to make them ‘cool’ results in an even more irritating visual offense. What do you think – are these 13 designs switching up the same-old same-old in a positive way?

Lots of Light: 9 Units at the Apartment in Kamitakada

Developers looking to squeeze big bucks out of a project by creating high-end luxury housing are a lot more motivated to build structures that are more interesting than usual, but every now and then, there’s the rare project that gives some aesthetic consideration to a building that’s actually affordable to the average city resident. Takeshi Yamagata Architects designed this 9-unit building in Tokyo as a cluster of four buildings connected by open-air pathways, integrating gardens, curving walls and lots of windows for the feel of an urban refuge minus the multi-million-dollar price tag.

325 Kent by SHoP Architects

Currently under construction on the site of an old Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the 325 Kent project by SHoP Architects is part of a redevelopment masterplan transforming the refinery into a 380,000-square-foot complex with a waterfront park and four residential buildings containing 2,800 rental units. SHoP’s building will house 522 of those apartments in a 16-story structure, arranged around a dramatic elevated courtyard. The units at the top will be stepped to create a series of spacious outdoor terraces. Nope – this one isn’t going to be cheap.

Pixelated Concrete: 222 Jackson by ODA

Over in Queens, the 11-story 2222 Jackson building by ODA features a pixelated concrete facade creating voids and projections for shade, privacy and outdoor spaces. Located just steps away from MoMA PS1, the building is conceived as a modular grid, giving it about 30% more outdoor space than the same-sized building with the same number of units arranged in a more typical shape.

Parasitic Growth: Plug-In City 75 by Stephane Malka

Commissioned to update and expand a 1970s-era building in Paris, architect Stéphane Malka proposes a system of parasitic wooden cubes that would attach to the facade, extending the living space and reducing the structure’s energy consumption by 75 percent. The unusual design would help mitigate problems with poor insulation and permeable windows while adhering to the city’s restrictive building laws, which don’t allow architects to build vertically.

Contemporary and Complimentary: p17 Housing in Milan

How do you sensitively design a new apartment complex that will blend in with a historic neighborhood while reflecting the era in which it’s being built? For P17, a residential housing complex in Milan, Italian architectural firm Modourbano harmonizes with surrounding buildings while retaining a contemporary feel, thanks to the beautiful natural hues in its sandstone facade.

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No More Ugly Apartment Buildings 13 Designs Refreshing The Paradigm

Extending beyond the existing rooftops like a fast-growing plant, this compact cylindrical home slotted into an unused urban plot in Milan features a breathable ‘skin’ connecting the interiors to the outdoors. Designed by New York-based architects SO-IL for Milan Design Week 2017, the MINI LIVING ‘Breathe’ installation is a response to the growing challenge to maximize available space in cities to comfortably accommodate more residences.

Built on a modular metal frame covered with a flexible, semi-translucent envelope that reacts organically to the environment, the home was designed for a family of three, and features six rooms and a lush rooftop garden. The ground floor is transparent to encourage interaction with the world outside; climb the spiraling staircase and you’ll find a series of private spaces for relaxation, work and sleeping, all separated by fabric canopies.

The outer skin lets in filtered sunlight, while the rooftop garden collects rainwater and helps filter the city air. Hammock-like nets suspended from the upper levels look out onto both the city outside and the interiors below. The architects describe the skin as a ‘jacket’ that can be zipped and arranged differently to protect against various external conditions. The more you layer it, the more privacy or water resistance it offers, so inhabitants can customize the needs of different rooms.

The idea, in part, was to ‘tune’ the interiors to the rhythms of the city, the weather and the sun outside, eliminating the closed-off feel that many homes tend to have. While the tent-like design may not be viable for many urban centers where cold weather, rain and theft might be a problem, it’s an intriguing idea for layering with more solid and secure materials like glass.

At just six feet wide, this incredibly narrow residence inserted into an alley in dense urban Tokyo is the latest example of Japanese architects thinking way outside the box when it comes to building new housing. The city is so developed, there’s almost no land left to build anything new, so they tend to get incredibly creative with even the oddest-shaped plots.

The four-story house by YUUA Architects and Associates extends about 36 feet into a former alley between two older buildings, and while the street-facing facade features floor-to-ceiling windows to maximize daylight and views, intimate spaces like bedrooms, bathrooms and main living areas are tucked into the back for privacy.

The minimalist interior design scheme includes floating platforms at various levels for a sense of openness, some of them made of metal mesh to let as much light pass through the house as possible. While such tiny residences are often kept bright white to create an illusion of extra space, YUUA makes an unusual choice with dark-painted walls.

There’s a semi-sunken basement for storage, and the first floor features a study area facing the street and a bedroom in the back. The third floor is comprised of an open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area, while the uppermost floor contains a bathroom, bedroom and terrace. Considering it’s only about as wide as an average adult male is tall, the house looks surprisingly livable.