Secrets of the City

MinnPost profiles Matt Desmond, a local designer in the specialized field of typeface design. (Probably the best known local who creates fonts is Chank Diesel.) It’s an interesting field, especially now that digital typography has created previously impossible expressive possibilities in type — the Walker takes the subject seriously enough that a few years ago they hired Matthew Carter, who is arguably the most famous typeface designer alive, to concoct a signature typeface for the museum (which they don’t seem to use much anymore, alas).

Are you a fan of type? What fonts do you favor?

What may be the most famous gas station in Minnesota is celebrating its 50th birthday Thursday. The Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet has the distinction of being the only gas station ever designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright is revered for the houses and large public buildings he’s designed, and this small gas station incorporates many of the same traits.

The great Secret Fun Blog takes a look at the work of TC’s Charles Spencer Anderson design firm: Basically, Plastock is the three dimensional embodiment of vintage stock art. Anderson started by amassing tens of thousands of old plastic toys, charms, game pieces, models, cake toppers, railroad scenery, and doodads, then his team customized them with paint and frankensteining techniques before photographing them in the most beautiful ways imaginable, and finally Photoshopping them to perfection. (Via.)

Why not just snap one together using pre-fab interchangeable parts from Loq-Kit, created by Twin Cities architect Patrick Freet?

You have to appreciate their Spunk: “Once they find out that we’ve taken the crazy pill, [that] you’ve walked down that weird, terrible path of being an entrepreneur-inventor, they have an amazing amount of respect for you, and you can kind of speak in the same language,” Johnson said. “You understand the risk.”

The Twin Cities has been getting a lot of attention lately because of the new library, the new Guthrie, etc., but we have a long history of enjoying our architecture. We’ve got our share of Frank Lloyd Wright. We’re home to Ralph Rapson. Until very recently, one of our daily papers even had its own architecture critic. So what are your favorite local buildings? As for me, it’s the IDS all the way, baby.

Here is my idea to replace the Metrodome.

The Walker + WCCO + Fischerspooner + stop-motion photography = Strange (But Kinda Good) PSA. [via]

In a year with so much esteemed new architecture popping up in Minneapolis, what local building do you think the Architectural Record chose in its annual Buildings of the Year? Yup, a church in New Brighton. More info on the Bigelow Chapel (plus pictures) is available in this story.

While putting together their series Field-Tested Books, Chicago-based Coudal Partners packed up their videocams and cruised up I94 to hang out with everyone’s favorite poster design company, Aesthetic Apparatus. The results are an intimate interview in their downtown Minneapolis design studio. Clenching beer cozies, the genial Apparatus lads, Dan and Mike, saunter around their studio, expounding ad hoc design philosophies (”found and reused”) and dropping aloof hints at the success of their craft. Do you have a favorite Aesthetic Apparatus poster?