Bought the T-shirt.

You don't get many architectural websites flogging $31 T-shirts, but it may be worth thinking about because that's last year's great idea from the Venturis at www.bobanddenise.org/shop.php. Actually this is the support site for an upcoming documentary on the architecture and ideas of R. Venturi and D. Scott Brown. Director and producer is one James Venturi, which keeps it all in the family, but I fear opens up the whole enterprise to the accusation of over-cosiness. The names may of course he a coincidence, in which case it is not a happy one. Naturally the graphic design is in your face. The site explains: 'It is purposefully "dumb" in a pop-art sense, embracing the ordinary in a way analogous to Venturi and Scott Brown's approach to architecture.' The Learning from Bob and Denise heading looks as though it was clipped from a poster, there is one of those noxious running text strips across the top in a vivid magenta, the section heads are little white strips apparently pasted over a background of repeated pics of Bob and Denise at the drawing board. Sorry guys, this isn't the way Bob 'n Denise transmogrified the ordinary into architecture. It's just dumb. There is a ten-minute video preview--mostly the pair talking. Excitingly you are offered more than 3000 Venturi-related images. When you click to see them you get a jumble of thumbnails of different sizes and no captions. You have seen and loved them many times before so it doesn't really matter if these and the site are a bit of a communications car crash.