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Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002

Sutherland Lyall deftly scrambles over the fells of architectural cyberspace.

Rolling stones

This month's architect site is that of the Californian hot shot Eric Owen Moss at the easily remembered address www.ericowenmoss.com. One of the not-so-young California lions, Moss has cheerfully rocked the architectural boat for some time now with buildings which involve happily inappropriate forms and decoration - and whose current big project, the New Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia, has sources in one of co-RIBA Royal Gold Medal winner, David Green of Archigram's early '60s projects at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Moss looks as if he will actually get his theatre built. The site has the signs of self-build, tricks with typography which don't quite work, main page showing photos of the brick factory-style office with its sawtooth lights at the back plus an image of the interior of the office which you can, for some reason, enlarge to a bigger view of an unremarkable computerless architectural office. There is quite a lot of text at the side, white on black and almost unreadably small. Don't get me wrong, this is actually a nice, friendly, rather homespun site, with unnecessarily awkward access to the projects (instead of simply listing them there is a clunky dropdown menu). You feel the office got fed up a bit before the site was really finished. You shouldn't, but you forgive all this web-design naivety because the architecture sings. But please don't look at it for tips about architectural website design.

Lemme out. Or in

The Aga Khan's ArchNet site is at http://archnet.org. There's no www and it's dot org not dot corn which is a US area network consultants' site. For some reason you have to register. I hate registering -- and I hate passwords, especially when they have no obvious point and especially when the registration asks quite a lot more about you than you might think an architecture site really needs to know. My experience is that web designers do the registration/password thing to give their customers an inflated sense of their importance. That can't be true here because this site is a collaboration between established heavy hitters MIT, Harvard and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Following a preliminary look I thought that a bit more work could be done on accessing material and I found the emphasis on the religious bit as oppressive as one does with Western sites which hang architecture on a particular faith hook. Still it is, after all, a site about Islamic architecture and the chatroom debate on the issues of archi tecture, Muslim and Islamic -- was happily wide-ranging.

It's early days but already it's clear that this site may be a victim of committee-it is and could do with a bit of external air on topics such as objectives, target audiences, search and display friendliness (you really need to know what you are after before you search), speed -- and, really and truly, whether it needs that self-important registration and password process. I especially ask this latter because a month later I've wanted to take a longer, better look at the site. As everyone does, I forgot the password I had given. There's an automatic email service for forgotten passwords. So I get it and type it in. Four or five times. To no effect. Wasn't there something in the preliminaries about promising to not say bad things? Had someone divined my lukewarm preliminary view? Craftily, I re-registered with a different password. Only to be told that my email address had already been registered. Presumably to me. So I'm locked in this password loop and can't get in to tell you any more about the site.

Modern ways of doing things

I'm reluctant to break a long Browser tradition but here are two sites which might be of some practical use. One is www.echonet.gr.jp/english/1_echo/index.htm. Don't bother about downloading the Japanese text. It's interesting because this seems to be the site for the Echonet standard for wiring up your next domestic commission. No, it's not about circuit breakers and switch plates but about things like remote computer monitoring, fire, flood and burglar alarms, checking on the mineral water stock and ice cube levels in your computer-fridge and that kind of thing. Hitachi, Matsushita, Sharp and Tosh the laptop people have all signed up and are deadly serious. Worth a quick scan if only to be able to upstage that upstart m&e bloke.

Type typology

The other site sounds just the ticket for part-time typographers, which is how, unfortunately, a lot of architects seem to think of themselves. It's the Linotype font identifier which allows you to identify that fantastic typeface you saw in that magazine which the office cleaners binned last week. You do this with an expert querying system, The site is www. fontexplorer.com/FontStore/ 1420487530/ UserTemplate/6. Click on the FontIdentifier tab at the top next to My Account. No and off you go. Stolid Ariel-plus-Times-New-Roman person that I am, I haven't been able to come up with a lost typeface with which to try it out. Linotype, naturally, will sell you the font you come up with.