Cyburbia - Buffalo University school of architecture's website - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001

Cyburbia is the name of Buffalo University school of architecture's website and it's at http://cyburbia.ap.buffalo.edu/pairc/. The less fashionable PAIRC stands for Planning and Architecture Internet Resource Centre of this, the only architecture school in the State University of New York system. The site has sections on planning, architecture and the built environment and local information (at the time of writing the Dean of Architecture's job was up) and a bunch of reports on future conferences - and there are several message areas. Although they can be great fun to idly ramble through, I'm never quite sure for whom these sites are meant. Students, perhaps?

I guess you would expect a university department to want to have a site as a kind of expression of its significance in the digital age etc, and as an extension of the library - and earlier I've suggested that many look as though they have been started by ambitious academics whose successors don't have quite the same motivation once the founder has been promoted or moved on. There are, incidentally, signs of that here, if the proliferation of this-page-cannot-be-found messages is anything to go by - and the odd, unintentionally funny response to searching names: for example clicking Antoni Gaudi in the Famous Architects section leads straight to the Alvar Aalto Foundation site. At least the As match. Maintain or Suicide should be the motto of architecture school sites.