Worldarch Europe

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2000

www.worldarch.com

Worldarch is an attempt to start an electronic architectural magazine in English which hopes to he 'your guide to architecture and manufacturers'. Edited from Scandinavia by Guy Fehn, the first issue focuses on northern Europe, with a major feature on Berlin looking at for instance Daniel Liheskind's Jewish Museum and Frank Gehry's new hank. Other buildings shown include Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen's new Royal Library in Copenhagen and Telje-Torp-Aasen's state library in Oslo.

Coverage of individual projects is patchy: usually a few photographs with some text, but in the case of the Libeskind museum, there is a perceptive and critical article by Rowan Moore. A problem that such relatively long texts reveals is the difficulty of reading large numbers of words in small type from a screen. In general, presentations of buildings seem text-heavy and light on images, and we were unable to find drawings.

As well as buildings, the site has departments for 'architects (links to websites of those featured), 'tools' (links to sites of for instance the Construction Specification Institute), and 'new talents' (links to architecture schools ranging from Aarhus to Cambridge). We were unable to find any links to manufacturers (who will presumably in the end provide income to keep the site going), but that may be due to machine incompatibilities.

In general, the site tries to be too much like a paper based magazine and does not exploit the potential of electronic media as much as it could. And language can be a problem, for instance a previously unknown architect called Lorenzo Piano has been discovered. But for all its problems, the site is interesting and has much promise for future development.