Browser: Sutherland Lyall continues to explore world architecture, peering through the great electronic forest - View - web sites - Brief Article

Electronically graven images

At http://architecture.about.com/ you can find About Architecture, a division of the vast About website. When it described Antoni Gaudi as Dada Surrealist I thought life would be much gentler if I simply gave up its newsletter. It is a site which is best described as relentlessly dim with such topics as 'What is Feng Shui?' and 'Vinyl Siding: Builders love it, historians loathe it ... Who do you believe?' But like rather a lot of internet sites it has some interesting serious information and one of About Architecture's potentially useful sub-sections is about architecture photo archives. The url is http://architecture.about.com/msubs05-photo.htm and it contains several pages of advice and, more important, links to libraries, some of them free. Check out About's own master directory at http://architecture.about.com/cs/archivesphotos/index.htm

Revisit

Back in February 2000 we quite liked Worldarch at www.worldarch.com but thought it should try to be less a print magazine on screen and more a screen magazine. Now it looks a bit more like a ghost magazine. Editor Guy Fehn has a little note to the effect that things have been 'a bit quiet due to our staff working full time on upgrading to a more user-friendly interface'. Maybe that explains why when you enter the above url it changes to 0ww.navalarch.com/index_2.asp. Fehn's note continues, ominously, '... we aim to catch up by Jan/Feb 2001.' The site is still there but...

Live and kickin'

One site we should have looked at before this is Archibot at the slightly irregular address http://archibot.com/. You can have a regular email newsletter sent to you, which, like all newsletters, is sometimes interesting, sometimes not. The site reminds you of a cheerful puppy: always up for it, darting here and there growling at that, a sharp bark here and an innocent romp with the ball of wool. I guess it's because, like the one from www.DesignArchitecture.com, most of the stories are culled from the web and very often penned by architecturally innocent writers. An example is a story from the Cincinnati Enquirer about the institution of the studio crit: 'Ordeal makes students cringe' runs the headline. "'They put us through hell" one ... student said, pleading for anonymity ... "That's fairly accurate", said assistant professor Michael McInturf ...' other headlines include 'Design Aesthetic Of Stock Car Racing' and 'Hallucination in Seattle', the latter a very lengthy critique of Frank Gehry's Experience Mu sic Project by Kazys Varnelis. Like most things on the internet you have to work a bit to get at the profitable vein but this site is normally worth the time you spend scratching around for ore.

Hero site of the month

Following last month's look at Nick Grimshaw's practice site, austere, grey, white, discreet bits of contrast red, sans serif and really tiny text, it seemed sensible to look at the site of his former partner Terry Farrell (also a recent knight) at www.terryfarrell.com. What unites them all these years since their great Puritan v Cavalier schism is a continuing preoccupation with minimalism and miniaturization. One or the other but not, please both. Oddly the frequently architecturally flamboyant Farrell's is the guiltier. Each of his site's projects is illustrated with a single thumbnail which clicks into ... a bigger thumbnail. Somebody has told the practice that hordes of architecture lecturers and possibly students will steal the images. So small Farrell images is the order of the day. Maybe pirate armies of architecture lecturers are indeed lurking behind the cyber bushes in the great electronic forest. But should Farrell really care? And text size: great for teenagers and people close up to their screen s trying to watch the raster lines but almost invisible for people over 40. The Guardian web critic, Jack Schofield, urges people to simply sack their designers for incompetence if visitors can't change the size of text so they can actually read it. You change it with View/Text Size. Or hold down the mysterious Alt Gr key to the right of the spacebar and use the mouse wheel to change from small to large. First time I've found a use for that key.

Undersung hero

You will all remember the Chemosphere, that 1960 hexagonal saucer-on-a-concrete-stalk Malin house by John Lautner the erstwhile Frank Lloyd Wright disciple. It's part of the visual heritage of a lot of architects over 40. Now there is a John Lautner foundation and a website at www.johnlautner.org which has a biography, bibliography and all too few sample projects. There is also an explanation that there is an archive of 9000 working drawings and material from it is available to anyone for a fee. What you do is fill in a form with your request -- hut, uh, oh. How on earth do you know what material to request? Do you ask for that house in that Coen Brothers movie starring Jeff Bridges aka the Sheats/Goldstein house which also featured in that adult movie Unleashed. Which of course none of us has seen. Or what about the Elrod House where Bambi and Thumper bounce on Sean Connery in Diamonds are Forever or the Rainbow House which Mel Gibson blows up in Lethal Weapon 2. OK so this is an amateur site. But Lautner wa s an ace architect and deserves rather a bit better than this. Maybe they should offer it to Toronto. For a more affectionate, though also pretty amateur view of the designer, try http://compbio.caltech.edu/~sjs/lautnerb.htm.