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Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2002 by Sutherland Lyall

Sutherland Lyall nimbly canters through the wilds of architectural cyberspace.

White Village, the movie

I don't know how you feel about people who collect ceramic miniature houses and cottages. So I don't know how you feel about downloading a QuickTime movie of the Weissenhofsiedlung at http://weissenhof.de (that's it, no www). It's the sort of thing you could probably have running on a computer over the office reception desk in case Modernism-savvy clients and potential staff pop in. The QuickTime movie is a fly-through, not the whole IBM Deutschland-crafted model. They keep that safely in Stuttgart for the year 2004 when the city opens the new Weissenhof Museum in that Corb + Pierre jeanneret double house on the old exhibition site which closed back in 1927. The virtual tour is not photographic reality quality. It's rather stylized which, given the rather stylized quality of the original buildings, is absolutely fine. But downloading it? There's no download button, you say. You can only watch the movie while we're logged on to the site. Aha. The file is actually already on your computer right now. It's to be found at C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. If you temporarily close down the web page and go straight there it will be at or near the end of the folder and it should be called something like rundgang.mov. Whatever it's called, it will be around 14.350KB long. Drag and drop it into a more accessible folder and there you are, an abstracty, Weissenhofsiedlung fly-around. If you hadn't had QuickTime 6 installed the site kindly does it for you in a couple of minutes. The intriguing home page is quite surreal with a small framed movie loop of a late '20s open-top motor car repeatedly driving across the frame, the famous double house in the background. But I'm still not entirely sure that it's not all the electronic equivalent of the ceramic thatched Bavarian village sitting pretty on Auntie's mantelpiece.

Pong revival

If you never check out a web site again you should take a look at www.blinkenlights.de. Blinkenlights is a German site whose principals turn buildings into simple computer screens. Their first public outing was in Berlin and more recently in Paris. Using their mobile phones, citizens of these cities could play computer games such as Pong and put up computer artwork of their own devising, love letters and such like -- all on the facades of otherwise boring city buildings. For the anniversary of the Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights took over 18 windows of each of upper eight floors in the chosen building and painted them white. Behind each of the windows they put a single 150W lamp on a tripod. Each light is connected to a relay and the 1 8x8 matrix of lights was controlled by three computers. The site allows you to download the latest version of the software which is written under UNIX (including Linux and Mac OS X.) OK, so we used to play Pong in pubs way back in the '70s at the dawn of the computer games ag e when the screens were monochrome and the pixels lumpy. As here. But when you can get to play Pong at the city scale who's complaining? There's also a great list of precursors and similar schemes. Though not, strangely, any reference to our own Peter Fink who used a similar scheme to count down the Millennium using the top of London's tallest building, Canary Wharf.

Being, becoming and material blobs

On the topic of obscurity and difficulty and amused at current architecture school misuse of the word 'materiality' I used Google (www.google.com) to look up 'blob architecture' on the Net. Studio dominees have recently been using 'materiality' in what they imagine to be an intellectual way of saying 'the materials used'. Antonym for 'immateriality', synonym for 'corporeality' (no, my dear old studio tutor, that doesn't mean to do with corporations), 'materiality' is normally a term used in the context of meaning and being -- bit loftier than 'to do with building materials'. In mitigation the word has developed special meanings in accountancy and law to do with states of mind but again, not building materials. I looked up 'blob' because I had a vague memory that, like 'materiality', it already had a fairly specific meaning -- this time in recent database theory. It does. I was going to reproduce a simple explanation but there isn't one and you probably wouldn't really be interested anyway. So, on the grounds that ridicule from the educated chattering classes will bring about a swift demise of building materials-style 'materiality' among the half-baked, will 'blob architecture' similarly fade from our language? I think not. First of all its corporeal manifestations are too much fun, second the other one is used exclusively by computer nerds and, third, blob has to be one of the least pretentious words you will ever, ever hear in a final year crit.

Victor ludorums

You would sort of expect Archigram, this year's MBA gold medallists, to have a site of their own. Not so. Though since they haven't operated as a group for decades it's not surprising. There is a terrific exhibition of their work doing the rounds, most recently in the US. This being England and the MBA, nobody thought of having it staged here to coincide with the handing out of the gongs. Still, searching around the net there's an excellent essay by Joel Sanders in the October 1998 issue of Artforum at www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/n2_v37/21230377/p1/article.jhtml?term =archigram. No don't try keyboarding all that in -- it will be on our web site at www.arplus.com whence you can copy it to Outlook Express. But hang on to the www.findarticles.com bit which is, no surprise, about finding articles. Its source material is admittedly a bit limited -- maybe 40 magazines in its arts and entertainment section including Modernism, Art in America, Art Journal, the aforesaid Art Forum. And Thrasher Magazine--which, sor ry, is about skateboarding. Unlike a lot of such indexes, it offers the complete text rather than a resume. Full marks.