Browser: Sutherland Lyall ploughs through the fertile fields of architectural cyberspace. (View).

Drawings that speak to you

The Object Shop at www.theobjectshop.com sells GDL objects on-line. CAD monkeys, as office fodder seem self-deprecatingly to call themselves, are probably aware that GDL stands for 'geometric description language'. The important thing for architects doing CAD is that objects, such as chairs and roof sandwiches, drain pipes, doors, whatever, can be described not only in terms of their two or three dimensions but in terms of materials, of the way they are combined to form the object, of thermal performance, of colour -- and basically whatever information you care to associate the object with which describes performance and behaviour. You pass your cursor over a GDL object and up comes the data in a box -- or it's spoken to you straight out of the screen. So they are 'intelligent' objects and behave parametrically which is to say according to their electronically embedded rules of behaviour. Actually I got all that latter stuff, apart from the talking, from GDL Technology at www.gdlcentral.com. The Object Shop s ite rather assumes you knew all about the subject in the first place. OK, it's a fantastic idea and I'm totally out of my depth about how this is usefully applied. I guess the thing for GDL-non-savvy architects to do is to go into the office on Saturday when the rest of the staff is playing five-a-side, try the GDL Technology site and then do a Google search for gdl. Don't hold your breath, though, for the early arrival of 'intelligent' parametric real-life building products.

Museum heating

London's Design Museum web site, at www.designmuseum.org/, once not very interesting, is now really quite good thanks to designers The Warm Company. There are the familiar (and therefore useful) section headings, one about the museum, another about exhibitions, others about education and supporting the place. There's a digital archive of design plus a digital archive of digital design. And the seventh heading is how to rent the museum. Like almost all British museums and institutions you can hire the place for the right dosh: in this case [pounds sterling]4.5K plus of course the catering. For whatever this adds up to you can have up to 250 people sitting down to dinner. You probably have long since downloaded Adobe Acrobat Reader and Macromedia Flash stuff but if not give the opportunity to do so here a big miss: instead of just pressing the relevant button there's a boring rigmarole involving going to the root site and clicking option after option. It's as if these big hitters are reluctant to give up their secrets -- which in the case of Adobe is probably the truth. Adobe is the company which horrified so many of its users when it had that visiting Russian programmer Dmitry Skylarov hurled into the slammer for, essentially, not being respectful about its software. Happily, late last year a US court threw the case out.

Great name, hollow echoes

Some time somebody has to write the history of London's architecture cabals. Apart from Peter Murray's prestigious closed-entry Architecture Club, there is a livery company, several dining clubs which foregather every second month in City livery halls and conduct slightly unhygienic rituals, proper Masonic lodges, hundreds of save this and that century's architecture societies, the private view invite lists of the multitude of architecture-related institutions and museums, groups of likeminded people which meet informally and occasionally give themselves a joke name (one was called the Philistine Fellowship) -- plus a lot more whose existence is either apocryphal or carefully hidden from the ears of the press. And some simply keep a low profile. The latter seems to be the case with Art and Architecture whose site is at www.artandarchitecture.co.uk and is not to be confused with the legendary former US magazine of that name or the New York walking tour company which owns the .com suffix although in truth the . co.uk site is more than somewhat pedestrian. The news update and news about new projects is wide columned, un-headlined, straight text sans even a thumbnail or two which makes for seriously less-than-interesting reading. There is an international practitioners' index but the only non-UK country listed is a place called Switerland. But if you work in London don't give up on them. They run some very interesting lecture programmes and the slackness of the site is what you sort of come to expect of voluntary organizations.

Dutch courage 

The Dutch site deArchitect emailed us and said we should look at its new dateline section, cheerfully forgetting to point out that, like the rest of the site, it is only in Dutch. Nor did they remember the www. bit which comes between http:// and the rest of the address. Our best minds finally sorted it all out and here, correctly, is the url: www.de.arcltitect.nl. The non-English bit is actually less of a problem than you might think. And yes we have scrutinized the home page for even the slightest hint of a union flag or the word English. It does of course mean that you won't get even the gist of the architectural commentary however familiar quite a lot of Dutch words are: nieuws is 'news', zoek is 'search' but links, service, agenda, media and even productin-formatie are exactly as they sound. I guess you would look at a site like this for the latest projects (at least we journalists do), enjoy what is there and hope for an English text version soon.

The students' voice

Transatlantic architects may be surprised about the fact that students in Britain don't pay for their university education. Or only a bit. But not for long, it seems when, under new government proposals (by people who all had free university education themselves), students will graduate with massive debts. It's fine for tyros and doctors and, well, lawyers. But architects in the UK, the lowest paid profession apart from old people's home carers, are apparently thinking seriously about reducing architecture courses to four years in order to give the impression to school leavers that architecture isn't all that much more expensive than other courses. In my experience most discussions about architectural education end up turning autobiographical ('I had to do measured drawing and I don't see why these whippersnappers ...'). So it's worth taking a wider look at a quite comprehensive site, ArchVoices at www.archvoices.org and also www.archvoices.com -- the 'think tank on architecture education and internship'. The latter has nothing to do with the White House but with years out and other practical experience with architectural practices. There's no space here for all the topics covered and sadly a search for both our standbys Callicrates and Ictinus produced zilch. However there are lots of other goodies: one resource, the library, has articles (not just the references but the articles themselves) on, among many others, women on the job site, studio culture, irresponsibility and on alternatives to the current models of the profession. Some architecture students, it seems, are interested in more than a meal ticket.

Play it again

Because architects create frozen music this month's pleasure is Pianographique at www.pianographique.eom. Unlike deArchitect this is a French site with an English version, you do some of the work and it's entrancing. Enjoy.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]