First off, Design Milk has a nice review of the best of architecture in 2011.

Then, enjoy this write-up of the Plumen light bulb by designer Samuel Wilkinson and product design firm Hulger. The Plumen was named the Design Museum's Brit Insurance Design of the Year.

Also from the Design Museum, the winner of the Brit Insurance Graphics Award for 2011 is BlogLESS favorite Homemade is Best, by Swedish Interactive graphics agency Forsman & Bodenfors.

And, finally, the interesting A Year in Web Design: How the Experts Saw 2011 from Web Design Tuts is worth a look.

Happy new year to each of you very fine BlogLESS readers.

Via DesignBoom.

In this volume, photographer Frédéric Chaubin reveals 90 buildings sited in fourteen former Soviet Republics which express what could be considered as the fourth age of Soviet architecture. They reveal an unexpected rebirth of imagination, an unknown burgeoning that took place from 1970 until 1990. Contrary to the twenties and thirties, no “school” or main trend emerges here. These buildings represent a chaotic impulse brought about by a decaying system. Their diversity announces the end of Soviet Union.

According to Professor Dan Harvey of the University of Toronto, all-glass buildings should never be built. In a recent interview, Harvey details the (not-so-surprising) reasons why. Many new buildings are designed with primarily glass exteriors, lack operable windows and require extensive air conditioning, yet somehow manage to be considered green. Harvey:

There's no way you can make an all-glass building green. There's no such thing as a green SUV. You shouldn't be building SUVs in the first place; you shouldn't be building all-glass buildings in the first place. And no amount of high-tech or fancy stuff can turn an inherently bad design into a green building.

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Imagine Learning from Las Vegas as illustrated by Chris Ware, and you’ll get a sense of François Blanciak's marvelously inventive new book, Siteless: 1001 Building Forms (The MIT Press, 2008).

Blanciak, a French architect who has worked alongside Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and the Danish provocateur Bjarke Ingels, now lives in Japan, where he is a research fellow at the University of Tokyo. In Siteless, his first book, he displays an equal gift for playfulness and rigor, drawing by hand 1,001 building types—fanciful and sometimes impossible—with no thought paid to site, program, or budget.

Read more at Metropolis.

1. The Third & The Seventh

Ridiculously-good CG on display here. Alex Roman takes us through a series of artfully-presented architectural spaces. (Really, it's all CG)

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DISTRUCTURE I

FREE STATE II

Using only a scalpel Galpin intricately scores and peels away the emulsion from the surface of the photograph to produce a radical revision of the urban form. The artist allows himself no collaging, or additions of any kind - each delicate work is a unique piece made entirely by the erasure of photographic information.

Via Data is Nature.

Sculpture/signage designed by Milton Glaser for the SVA Theater.

The new SVA graphic identity, also by Glaser, reflecting the sculpture above.

In an interview about the renovation, Glaser discusses his past architectural designs, the inspiration for his work with the SVA, and the challenges of working with space. It's worth a read to hear him talk about architecture with the same thoughtfulness he displays towards graphic and identity design.