Browser - architectural Web sites - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2001 by Sutherland Lyall

Lordy lordy

This month's practice site is that of the Foster office at www.fosterandpartners.com. It's a fast download and once you click past the orangey red of the home page you get into the white text on black of the rest of the site. It's fast because it's mostly text: you click on small thumbnails to get more details about a project and, once you are on the more detailed page, you click again to get a bigger image. Anywhere on the site you know when you can get further and better particulars because the name is underlined and in yellow. That means you can't see quite a lot of the oeuvre complete which is, of course, more intriguing.

Fast, with text whose size can be changed to suit your eyesight and with mostly intuitive navigation, it's a really efficient site and of course the buildings include some of my lord Foster's greatest hits. Still the acid test is the Millennium Bridge across the Thames. Inaugurated in May 2000, it began to wobble, noticeably but not life threateningly, when people walked over it. It was hurriedly closed. Arups were the engineers and their site is reasonably open about the problems and solutions. The bridge is lengthily featured on the Foster site. But not a word about wobbling there. Then another little disappointment because the heading 'animation' has got you excited. You download an iPIX plugin for Explorer (although it doesn't seem to check if you have a later version already installed) and after a bit of random clicking you get the idea of how to get the animations running. It's a bit of a letdown: less animation than QuickTime home movie and one hilarious sequence in which Foster sits at his desk and presumably explains how he designed the Fusital door handle. I say presumably because there's no sound. The above infelicities are probably the consequence of the practice having spent a lot of time and money on developing a really good site and then, exhausted, not being yet prepared to think too much about maintenance. Sadly for my trade even text gets old and tired.

Great Buildings of Fire

At least the site doesn't have ads. Browsing the Great Buildings site www.greatbuildings.com which we looked at in November 1999, and keeping in mind last month's student manifesto about hating ads, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a TWA ad when I thought I was looking at an item on the Maison Carree. Then on the more detailed page which tells you among other things, but not many, that it is a 'well-preserved Roman temple. Corinthian columns' located in Nimes, Provence, France, you have the opportunity to read a Lufthansa ad, an ad for 3D Design Workshop, an ad for the S150 Great Buildings CDROM (GBC CD-ROM) available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and CADOutpost, a link to the RIBA library catalogue, a link to Google with Maison Carree already entered and the first screen waiting up there for your inspection, and then another reference to Amazon where you can buy books listed in the resources section. I immediately checked back with www.modernarchitecture.com, last month's Calvinist student site, only to find a kind of chat room containing messages about buying houses in the Los Angeles region and a badly spelled plea from a British student about working in the US for a bit. I blushed for England. Yes, there's quite a lot more than that but not quite what was promised at the beginning of the year. Still, there are no ads.

On the other hand Great Buildings has quite a few buildings, and the above miscellany of ads littering every page. One hopeful theory I've heard is that, as in magazines and with cars in the street in front of buildings you've just photographed, you unconsciously filter out the visual interference. Still with all that ad revenue you might have expected Great Buildings to have at least mentioned that Maison Carree is a hexastyle Corinthian temple.

Castaways

There's a warning on the current Royal Institute of Australian Architects site about a design competition for three detention centres for the quaintly named Immigration and Multicultural Affairs department. 'The conditions of entry do not comply with RAIA policy.' The site is at www.raia.com.au/ and professes to have the biggest database of architects and building designers in the country. You hope it would. For some reason the database is behind a secure connection which slows things down a lot but probably makes the RAIA web people feel important. It's no better than the RIBA's list of architects and, worse, it's a guide only to practices, not names. You have to be a member with a password to access much of interest and it's pretty slow. Still it recognizes one of the most significant structures ever built in Oz, the almost unknown Sydney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne. It is a large tension structure in a park using aluminium faced plywood panels fixed to a series of prestressed cables attached to a catenary c able stretched between two masts. It should be in all the books because it's so early: 1957 and predates Frei Otto's built work by nearly a decade. Engineers were W. L. Irwin, architects Yunken Freeman. Nice to know they know. Nice to know they care.