FEED is the main blog where Aeronaut Studio provides various design inspiration in cars, photography, architecture, graphic design, and personal projects. By Josh Lopez
MARIN COUNTY CIVIC CENTER
The Marin County Civic Center is an endless streamlined moderne prairie building. Its not one particular style but an emphasis on the style of the architect himself. Frank Lloyd Wright cut no corners on his stylistic vision of this building from the size of the doorways to the material of the hardware. There is a lot to look at when walking through the building. So many materials make up the interior aesthetic of his buildings. Red tile floor, dark wood trim, gold spheres, heavy gauge brass hardware, long white walls, geometric furniture, stainless steel water fountains, and green plants. Its an eclectic collection of materials that you don't see in many buildings. Even if you didn't know who Frank Lloyd Wright was, if you walked in to this building, the Guggenheim Museum, or the Xanadu gallery on Maiden Lane, its very apparent that one man designed all three of these buildings.
STREET FIND: JENSEN HEALEY
Jensen is a foreign brand to me seeing as though I have only seen 3 in person. One of them was an Interceptor and two of them were Healey's. All were found in the city. Although Jensen Motors ended up going bankrupt, the styles that came out from them were oddly and uniquely British. The fit and finish on both Healey's that I found were a bit off but I'm not sure of the cost of one of these back in the day but its managed to survive. The convertible doesn't look water tight and the front valance looks like its made out of plywood. But the interior looks maintained despite the years.
STREET FIND: BMW 2002 (Roundie)
The 2002 is a car that I've always been surrounded by throughout my life. My dad had one when I was 13 and he always took us to the 2002 meet ups. It wasn't till I started to learn more about vintage cars that my appreciation for it began. Such a simple shape but very calculated in its form. I think that theres merit in restraint when it comes to design. The trend for todays marketing is to clamp your head still and force you to look at something, and demand that you like it. The appeal of older designs is that they are simpler and grow on you over time. They are subtle and lean. They are built with character but leave room for you to grow with it and inevitably add your character to it as you own it.
FUEL BOX 1
I have always liked tin cans especially these one gallon tins because of the unique proportions they have. For some reason the proportions of these cans and other euro storage boxes are really attractive to me. Something about the metric system creates aesthetically pleasing volumes.
The simplicity of old screen printed packaging is inspiring because of the limitations and the amount of creativity it takes to make an exciting graphic. The restraint on number of colors and intricacy of shapes really made a stronger impact on my graphic sense more than any packaging I see today. The idea of fuel boxes was initially to use old tin cans with vintage graphics and turn them into tool boxes but after buying my first can, I realized that it may not always turn out strong enough due to rust.
I plan on making many more of these and hopefully none of them will be the same. I've been thinking about this project for a while but finally got the time to actually make it, and decided to make it a gift for someone. It took me a week to finish it but if I were to only focus on this, it would probably take me a couple days. It was a fun project to design and think of an interesting back story on how it would come into existence.
Its a pretty straight forward concept with a lot of freedom for how it could be used. It could a tool box, lunch box, pencil supply container, whatever you need it to be. Take a look at some visuals, hope to make more soon.
