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Sutherland Lyall reviews important architecture websites.

Deep to dumb

About Architecture at www.com/arts/architecture/ is a wonderfully indiscriminate site run by Jackie Craven of the big US About network.

Standard sections in the architecture site include advice on finding an architect, feng shui, great buildings, green architecture, house styles, magazines and a lot more on these lines. There's an architectural glossary, chart of the world's tallest buildings, a toolkit for working out how old is your (American) house and discussions on issues such as Does Suburbia Breed Violence? Attached to this discussion is a guide to the best articles and resources on, say urbanism.

So there is a mix of everything from academic to really dumb. Don't let the dumbing-down bits put you off this site: there are some really good sections.

Green guides

Architects committed to sustainability have their own favourite sites out of the 160 000 or so to be visited using the Google search engine but here, for beginners, are five of the latest most interesting and useful:

www.sustainableabc.com/

www.reddawn.com/

www.caad.ed.ac.uk/units/ESAU/

www.aloha.net/[sim]laumana/

and www.lib.berkeley.edu/ENVI/GreenAll.html.

Still the best?

Last time we looked at architext it was late 1999 and the site's url was: www. thehub.com.au/[sim] morrisquc/architext. Lots of room for typing errors there. Now it's at the marginally less finger twisting http://home.pacific.net.au/[sim]morrisquc/archi text (note the absence of the customary www). Then we described it as 'One of the most comprehensive and useful architectural sites at the moment ... Information is on the whole up-to-date, carefully chosen and edited'. They promptly put that encomium on their home page, along with the Canadian Center for Architecture's 'one of the three best one-stop sites for architecture on the Internet'.

Constructed and maintained by Brisbane, Australia, Anthony Morris QC and architect Alice Hampson, it's awkward, clunky, curiously naive in design, uses scarily big type and occasionally Roman numerals and is in serious need of a design overhaul. Actually it has probably got too big to contemplate a makeover. But if you can ignore all that, this is a site you could spend a week roaming around, finding information about nearly everything about architecture.

Useful in the office

It always happens on a Friday night when the office computer guru has gone home: you're faced with a file whose suffix, extension, type name, whatever you call them locally, you've never seen before and you haven't the faintest idea what application will open it. This is when you check out one of these sites: whatis?com is a general computer encyclopaedic information site including extension explanations at http: / /whatis.techtarget.com.

The more singleminded http://extsearch.com has details about more than 1700 file extensions and directs you to the bulletin board of last resort www.kresch.com/exts /ext.htm where you can ask about totally baffling extensions. What these sites can't do is supply you with the application to read the mystery file.

Googie Woogie

If you don't live on the US west coast you probably haven't heard of Googie architecture. That could mean you have avoided the worst excesses of what, in the words of one admirer, is typified by, 'futuristic outrageous designs ... everything from oversize signs to curved, padded booths in turquoise and salmon shades. It is flagcrete and dingbats and terrazzo About the only word that defines Googie is kooky, daddy-o.'

Googie's was, apparently, a chain of coffee shops in Los Angeles during the '40s and '50s though another theory is that it was named for an outlandish coffee shop on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights, LA designed by John Lautner. Detractors labelled these structures the Googie School of Architecture. Nevertheless architectural historians in the city of Anaheim (home to Disneyland) are supposedly now recording and archiving Googie (and the related Tiki: no don't ask) for posterity.

Though some Googie sites have disappeared, suggesting a decline in interest, Googie Architecture Online remains the definitive site. It's Chris Jepson's, it's dedicated and comprehensive at: http://home.fea.net/[sim]cjepsen/Googie.htm. Among other things it lists current campaigns over endangered Googie coffee shops and buildings. The site http://www.drive-on-in.com/googie.htm has useful links to related sites including the Southern California Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and several articles. And it's worth looking at the related east coast Doo Wop Preservation League at http://www.doowopusa.org/FAQ.html.