Wilfred Armster
Wilfred John Oskar Armster was an American architect, and principal of the Connecticut-based Wilfred Armster Architects. Education and early work. Armster was born and raised in The Bronx, New York. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Armster studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich and completed an architecture degree at the University of Michigan in 1964. He began his career at the Detroit offices of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls in the mid-1960s. After working in New Haven, CT for Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates in the late 1960s, Armster established his own firm in Guilford , CT, in 1971. Residential projects. Armster’s geometrically austere structures contain frequent references to bridges, walls and holes, and usually feature at least one side with no openings or windows. Many of his residential buildings were designed for difficult, steeply sloped lots. He won his first AIA Award for The Bridge House in Glastonbury, CT, a toppled “L”-form built on a steeply wooded site. A second Bridge House in Ann Arbor, MI, features a 120-foot span between two hills. The project won the AIA Connecticut 2009 Design Award, whose jury cited the project’s “taut simplicity.” Armster’s projects  are frequently constructed with minimum changes to the natural state of the sites on which they are built. Several have large trees growing through them. Armster's 1987 project in Guilford, Connecticut, an elongated copper-clad structure, was opposed by local residents who felt its modernist form was incompatible with the town’s colonial heritage. However, the building has become a recognized and accepted landmark in the decades since.