I’ve really been enjoying the work of Mr. Armstrong lately. He does all kinds of wonderful large scale art deco architectural wonders using a variety of media & techniques. While the site is a little tricky,  just be patient and click on the dates at the top to navigate through the various works. I also really love his drawings as well, definitely need to visit his studio soon.

San Diego is classy, Michael James Armstrong is proof.

Nice blog post on Louis Kahn and design by committee.

“If you get direction from a committee�, Kahn once advised corporate leaders about design, “I am positive the product will be less, the expression will be less. If it can be in an individual, it will have such resources that a committee meeting many, many times would never have. The individual has the ability to see it all as a unit. From sketchy first realization mixed with faith in what is realized, can there be exchange of a designer and the man who wants the design made. There can be a fruitful exchange which can make the executive a better executive and the designer a better designer.�

Visual Acoustics is a documentary film about the Modernist photograher, Julius Shulman. Once you have seen his images, they will be engrained in your head forever. He has a wonderful gift to be able to capture a building’s personality and setting a tone. If you have never seen this book, it is a luxury worth having.

Thirty years ago, American film audiences pressed low in their seats as a massive white wedge of machine parts passed overhead. With the release of George Lucas’s Star Wars, the smooth, silvery flying saucers that had dominated postwar sci-fi became embarrassing reminders of an obsolete vision of the future.

Lucas envisioned a World of Tomorrow dominated by black, white, and gray; hard-edged, massive, and inorganic forms, covered with a salty acne of apparatus. The film’s visual program was a departure from the saucers and occasional capsules writ large that sci-fi audiences had grown accustomed to, but its colorless symmetrical ships should have been recognizable to at least a small portion of its audience — those familiar with contemporary art.

In a 1967 essay on minimalism, Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential critic, could have been describing Star Wars: “Everything is rigorously rectilinear or spherical. Development within a given piece is usually repetition of the same modular shape, which may or may not be varied in size.� Greenberg rejected minimalism as pedestrian. “Minimal works are readable as art,� he wrote, “as almost anything is today, including a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper.� Perhaps because of its fantastic nature, the Death Star has never been recognized as an essential work of minimalism — but it is one. Its destruction has never been acknowledged as a turning point for modernism — but it was one.

Continue reading the entire piece here
Found via Flavorwire

So what happened was… Lance Clark from Clarks Shoes UK thought that the company courtyard was a little dull. So he called ROSO to see what they could come up with. And then Arch Daily wrote a really great little post about it that you can read and see more at over here.

Mac Funamizu’s phone concept using a wrap around screen is the you know what of phone design. It would really interesting to play with visuals/videos on that sort of screen format. Ah, we can hope right? (Boing Boing)

One thing I love about the winter is that I get to stay inside and read more. To get ready, we are almost giving away ALL the books in our Architecture section. A lot of the books are at low quantity and when they are gone, we will most likely not order them again. So if you want to get a decent one-time deal to expand your architecture collection, this is your time. Everything is marked down.

Here are some links to some great Architecture blogs:
http://www.archinect.com
http://archidose.blogspot.com
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com
http://supercolossal.ch
http://www.inhabitat.com
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog

We just got in MoMA’s new book, Modern Swedish Design.
At first glance, it doesn’t stand out from other books on Modern Design, but this book definitely deserves another chance. The rarely translated writings of the founding texts that initiated modern design in Sweden, make it a necessary addition to any designer’s collection. This book shouldn’t be overlooked!

“An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture with the architecture of the magazines acting as the site of innovation and debate. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazineâ€� was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. The terms “littleâ€� and “magazineâ€� are not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals along with professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,â€� influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.” - Click/Stamp/Fold

Beautiful work from Takeshi Miyakawa.