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Architectural Review, The, August, 2002 by Sutherland Lyall

Rum Outram

English architect John Outram has long defied classification. Look at www.johnoutram.com and you'll see what I mean. You could, I suppose, call him a kind of Classicist--except it's kind-of Classicism out of Louis Kahn who was, if memory serves me, one of Outram's heroes back in the early years. On the other hand maybe he's the true inheritor of the Classical mantle. Whenever you jeer at latterday retro-Classicalists they point out that the tradition they espouse is vibrant and innovative and creative and continuing. You look at their architecture and say 'Oh, yeah? How about Classical-by-numbers instead?' But not Outram. One of his many (and historically correct) propositions is that the architecture of Classical times was not white, pure, timeless stuff, but was painted in a riot of quite savage colours. His own smallish oeuvre is colourful beyond belief. One of his other propositions is that the orders are up for grabs in the sense that he's quite happy to invent new ones including the Robot Column with structural glass support--which is a kind of anti-capital. And Outram loves to write. His text is full of redundant capital letters and is lavishly verbose. But it is consistently unexpected. Here's one random surprise on the orders: 'Quinlan Terry [a contemporary English Classicalist] ... considers that the Canonic Orders were given by God Himself. But then if we had been meant to fly, God would have given us wings whereas we know it was the Wright Brothers'. Outram is the inventor of Blitzcrete, Doodlecrete, Videosecco and Video Masonry and you're going to have to check it out yourself on this wonderful ramble of a site. I wish, however, Outram could grasp that dark blue on black crossheads are impossible to read on screen.

North of the border

If you operate in London you are conscious of a stream of disapproval/envy/hatred directed inward from the architectural community around the rest of the United Kingdom. Nowhere is this stronger than from north of the border. So that anything I, despite my name and ancestry, say about the new site www.scottisharchitecture.org will be taken as an example of London bias. Whatever, here goes. This is an all moving speaking site. It starts with a wireframe of the Lighthouse, the building occupied by the Scottish architecture centre. It swoops and rotates and settles down with its corner tower transformed into nuts--no, the things you put on bolts. These diminish in size, turn blue and start spinning when you put the cursor over them and the name of the sub-section of the site they represent appears on the right in a box. Involving around involves, sigh, more rotating nuts and text spelling itself out and, aaarg, there's an animated presenter, Jinny, I think she called herself, who in dalek tones finds it 'so gr oovy being a virtual architect ... if Mackintosh were alive now he would probably be virtual ... Anyway enough about me ... we are the envy of the architectural fraternity in England.' See what I mean. You can imagine the design committee--for this is a camel of a website--sitting around in heavy overcoats against the grim Glasgow chill, offering to script and direct the videos and animation--and because they were the client, actually getting to do these things. Amateurishly. Remember the Browser adage: Just because you can, there's absolutely no reason why you should.

Optimist?

I'm about to run a campaign to make all web designers list on all their home pages the last update of their sites. I know you can look it up under File/Properties/ but what a pain. It should be there on the opening screen.

Resquiat in pace

There's also the issue of what to do with your site when it gets to be too much for you -- or the faculty pulls the funding or your spouse tells you that there are plenty of potential partners out there who could be more fun. One way not to do it is to hide the fact from visitors. The now unsupported Florida-based e design (just for the record it's at sustainable.state.fl.us/fdi/edesign) lets you flop around the site and only when you hit News do you discover that this is now an archive site and for sale: 'free or best offer' reads the lugubrious sign. Pity. It was about best-practice in design and planning and, virtuously, it has a date -- though the latter is two years old. There is still a searchable archive but you feel just like those blokes who boarded the Marie Celeste. Maybe it's best to simply kill a site completely rather than wait for better times. Trouble for that is that the current buzz is that more and more web sites are going pay-only/mostly.

The unknown architect

There are some very strange sites about. And that's just in architecture. One I have had on my list for some time is www.cupola.com/bldgixc.htm. As it says on its home page it is 'an eclectic collection of historic architecture, fine art, picturesque landscapes, word play ... It is also a great place to learn more about cupolas and where to find them.' And indeed it is. Technically its landscape views tend to the Sublime rather than Picturesque but there are also collections devoted to American capitol buildings, feline sculpture and, among many more, an unknown architect building index. The latter is taxonomically intriguing because if you were looking up a building you might not necessarily know that its author was unknown. I think I've got that right.