Browser: Sutherland Lyall trawls the web to find architectural distinction - View

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002

Clunky mechanics, impeccable type

With David Mackay star of the March Architectural Review cities conference at the RIBA in London (p26), it seemed proper to take a look at his practice site at www.mbmarquitectes.com. MBM Arquitectes is the 25-strong Barcelona office run by Josep Martorell, Oriol Bohigas and David Mackay -- which he pronounces the Irish way as 'macki' with the accent on the first syllable. Unless you run two screens it is really irritating because, accompanied by a short group of electronic chords, the black page takes over your entire screen and you have to give MBM your undivided attention -- and have no way of changing the small type to something more readable. But this is a proper design job with its associated sounds and (slightly jerky) opening and closing panels for each new page and impeccable and minimal graphics and typography. It has the usual sections: a profile of the partners, projects, a bit of news and contact details. The opening page has a white title panel with mug shots of the three partners adjacent to th e just-readable block of type describing the practice. The nice thing is that when you accidentally wipe your mouse across the partners' mugs the photo changes to reveal them as they were in the first flush of their architectural youth, probably circa the mid '60s. The adjacent block of too-small type illustrates the importance of text editing. Because this text is long you have to do a clunky number involving a down arrow and what, you discover, is an erratic slider bar. But that is detail. A nice detail, which could well be emulated by other architectural sites as beautifully typographed as this, is that MBM have credited designer Marta Linas.

The Great Work

Arteyclopedia, at www.artcyclopedia.com/about.html, says its mission is to become the definitive and most effective guide to museumquality fine art on the Internet. In February it claimed to have 'indexed 1200 arts sites [and to offer] more than 32 000 links to an estimated 100 000 works by 7500 renowned artists'. This ambitious package is the work of Calgary-based John Malyon who is hoping 'to develop a system for commercializing the Arteyclopedia in such a way as to add value for visitors (by providing them with additional useful and relevant information), rather than subtracting value (e.g. through indiscriminate use of banners)'. It's an interesting idea -- although you worry about it being so successful that it monopolizes the field and starts charging lots of dosh for 'added value'. However perverse it might be, one of the pleasures of surfing is the difficulty involved in finding obscure architectural images. What Malyon has done is to search out myriad art/architecture collections, many of which have appeared here, and to make links directly to the relevant information. It's a discriminating, tailor-made search engine. In an open letter to sites, he says, rather cheekily I reckon, that 'What we do not do is drop visitors off at your "front door" so they can read a letter from your director, look at a photo of the facade of your building, or take a virtual tour'. Exactly what we all want. Yet quite a lot of sites have their visitor-meter on the home page (where else?) and bypassing it means that the extra visitors Malyon promises can't be verified or even counted. Often financial support for a site depends on verifiable visitor numbers. Still, it seems to work pretty well and architecture is well represented. Try it while it's still free.

Strange, labyrinthine, compelling

When you type in www.geocities.com/ateliermp up comes a black screen with the heading Archive-Grotto, a picture of a rococo, grottesque [subs sic.] architectural detail and the immortal words underneath 'Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom' attributed to Tristan Tzara and dated 1918. Don't be put off. You click on the box at the top right hand corner labelled 'Yahoo movies exclusive' and you go to Today@Yahoo movies and an advertisement about how to lose 10 pounds. It's a box which appears to support most of the pages on the site so you put up with it. Fed up with this, you hit the Back button, click on the aforementioned grottesque picture and up comes a welcome page and a 'textual map of the site'. There are four main heads: Texts/documents, Projects (by Landscape Agency New York who seem to be the directors of the site), Serious Real -- the Anti Journal -- and finally the Landscape Agency New York news and information service. There's a warning at the bottom: 'TRAVELLER'S ADVISORY: THE ARC ARCHIVE-GROTTO IS ALSO A LABYRINTH'. This is utterly correct. Still, despite all one says about the need for clarity on the Web, this is a wonderful ramble of a site which is not always very obviously about architecture or landscape but which is pervaded by an architectural sensibility and topicality and which offers links to a wonderfully catholic range of things, ideas and texts to do with those eternally fascinating topics. Quite a lot of the material is strange but, quite untypically for this kind of architectural outer-rim stuff, it's rarely pretentious or pompously sententious. You will need to spend a couple of weeks roaming the labyrinth -- but the rewards are likely to be quite high.