Browser - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, May, 2001

Sutherland Lyall reviews important architecture websites.

Archeire

Archeire is the website for Irish architecture and it's at www.irish-architecture.com. Because it's so cleanly designed you miss the fact that it's home for a number of diverse websites to do with architecture, the Irish Georgian Society, Irish Landscape Institute, the Irish Architectural Archive, the Architectural Association of Ireland and the like -- though not the Dublin-based Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland which, though it is not mentioned, is at www.riai.ie. No this is not the place for discussing Irish architectural politics. Archeire also has sections on the architecture of Dublin and on, among others, its most prolific architectural son Michael Scott, best known architectural daughter Eileen Gray and most famous architectural export Kevin Roche. It's pretty much an exemplary national site: cool, unfussy, comprehensive, well laid out and accessible.

Curate's Times

The rambling website of the Royal Institute of British Architects is good in parts, especially its library catalogue. And the institute sends out a small group of excellent newsletters among them RIBAWorld which gives a snapshot of architectural events around the world. It's a weekly pleasure and if you're a subscribing or corporate member you get it from RIBAWorld@inst.riba.org.

Gold in the desert

When you study architecture at the university of Nevada, Las Vegas they presumably supply you with sensory overload prevention equipment. That's not just because of the madness of the local architecture but because of the sheer comprehensiveness of its architecture studies library which has clearly spent lots on video and microfiche material. It is at http://library.nevada.edu/arch. You can't read the texts online but some extremely helpful person has been busy annotating the material with descriptions which makes a search or even a ramble through the material a pleasure. The main U of Nevada site, visited several years ago, has probably the first proper web-based information site about architecture and construction. It's at http://library.Nevada. edu/arch/rsrce/webrsrce/contents.html and it is still very impressive.

Gridlock

In the same line of business is the Architecture Virtual Library from the Toronto University at www.clr.utoronto.ca/VIRTUALLIB/arch.html. The differences are that quite a lot can be viewed online and that the material is rather miscellaneous. Nevada decided it wanted a great resource, Toronto plainly said you can have one if it doesn't cost us very much. So the latter relies very heavily on contributed material and, lacking a rigorous taxonomy, in consequence is incoherent and extremely patchy. I've looked at a number of similar sites visited several years ago and many of them, starting out with bright hopes and good intentions, have simply stalled. It's partly, you sense, a matter of some academic on his or her way up the tree insisting on the faculty having a website to which the architectural world would flock -- and moving on to higher things, leaving the site floundering. Whatever the case here, there are rather a lot of links which are no longer available. Naturally they are the ones you wanted to look at.

You've been had

British artist Nick Crowe realized some time last year that he could have a bit of fun with arts institution websites. You will have heard of smart people registering well known company names as websites and charging the earth for handing them back. The RIBA apparently paid more than a hundred grand for its www.architecture.com. Savvy companies register their name with the .com suffix -- and with their local .co suffix and with .net and .org -- and they'll add the new suffixes coming into being later this year. Also they register soundalike names. Not being particularly up on this kind of thing and normally being strapped for spare cash, arts institutions in England, such as the National Gallery, have tended to register as a .com or .org or even .edu but rarely as all three.

Which is where Crowe came in. He registered 29 gallery and related sites and set up home pages which gently send up the galleries. When the galleries found out they did everything from falling about laughing to sending outraged lawyers' letters. Eventually Crowe, as he had always intended, handed over ownership of the sites to the appropriate institutions. The Architectural Association seems to have liked theirs so much that you can still see the Crowe version. It's at www.architecturalassociation.co.uk. The accompanying audio version of The House of the Rising Sun played on a Bontempi organ is oddly moving. Try it.

Outrage

Lets design the best building in concrete that we can for its purpose... a building that in every part smells concrete'

Eero Saarinen's interest in exploring the potential of material as an inspiration for design was most emphatically expressed in his proposal for the new terminal for TWA at Idlewild. After receiving the commission in 1956, he created a building whose soaring forms suggested a vivid sense of flight. Completed in 1962, the TWA terminal is now under threat. The Port Authority of New York needs more space for another terminal so it has developed plans to eliminate Saarinen's satellite structures. And although the terminal and one satellite were registered as historic landmarks in 1994 this seems unlikely to stop the Port Authority who seem intent on expanding facilities at all cost.