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Sutherland Lyall daringly hurls himself through architectural cyberspace

Every picture tells a story

There's this show on at London's National Gallery about how Renaissance artists did pencil drawings on their raw canvases as a guide to the final brush strokes -- all revealed by infra red or whatever imaging. The totally fascinating things they dream up for the punters. Not. But there's an uncanny parallel in the computer world and it involves architects who, after the movie industry, are responsible for electronically shifting the biggest drawing files around the world. Enter steganography. No nothing to do with dinosaurs. It's also called digital watermarking and is the art of digitally encrypting messages among the 1s and 0s of otherwise innocuous files, the most currently fashionable of which are image files. That stray squiggle around the north point on the drawing you got via email today was actually a passionate declaration of affection from that CAD jockey in the Hong Kong office to George in the photocopying room. Anybody, including mad bombers, can do steganography using software off a magazine cov er or the Net. Given the way pro-snooping laws are proliferating, architects can now expect regular visits from the security boyos. Read about steganography at www.jjte.com/stegdoc/indexbk.html and search the web with an engine such as Google.

Stirring up trouble

Maybe someone can explain the politics. There is the so-so site of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland at www.riai.ei and Archeire, a great site to do with all Irish architectural and heritage things, at www.archeire.com. Why, you want to know first, do the republic's architects have a Royal institute based in Dublin? Second, the RIAI's search engine comes up with no mention of the really significant resource represented by Archeire. And why does Archeire's search engine only come up with RIAI awards results? Architectural daggers drawn? Hissy fits by the Liffey? Pistols at dawn on the Burran? On second thoughts, given where they are, maybe we don't want to know about the politics.

Portland Place dot corn reinvents itself

The new RIBA website is still at that to-kill-for url www.architecture.com. One of its features is a section called 103 Things Architects Do. Among the things architects apparently do are Reclamation, Production Information, Fund Raising Advice, Food Service Design and Building Maintenance. Apart from the fact that Reclamation is listed twice, Designing Terrific Buildings is not to be seen at all. I've a strong suspicion about which RIBAman is behind this list and God help us all if it's the best marketing 666 Portland Place can manage on behalf of the profession. That pleasant, self-serving myth of the architects as uomi universali has been transmogrified into 'talented at Food Service Design, Fund Raising and Building Maintenance'.

Apart from this the new site, now edited by an old Architectural Press toiler so we're not going to say anything bad about it, is much cooler in design than before, courtesy of designers theothermedia. If it looks a bit commercial maybe that's right for the twenty-first century British institute. But there are still some bits to iron out on the site. For example in the 2002 awards page a caption says 'this picture shows the house at ...' Er, what picture? you ask, for on a page where you might expect to see what buildings got awards this year there are no illustrations at all. As a generality of course that's not a bad thing because it speeds up the page but ... Two things we journalists use on the RIBA site are the members' list and the online catalogue -- where we check out what and how much our rivals are writing and crib hard information. We all use the members' list as an online rolodex of architects' phone numbers. I have had problems in the past with the latter but it now seems to work really well. Dam mit, they'll start charging for it now. And the RIBA online library index, which is the foundation of the institution's learned society status, is as good as before although getting to the main search page is now really slow.

Dear darling dodos

The days of Empire are well and truly over when a major British public school and one of the significant London city churches find themselves on this year's World Monuments Fund Watch list of endangered species at www.wmf.org/a/watchlist. But are things quite what they seem? The former is Stowe House in Buckinghamshire which, mysteriously, seems to be otherwise flourishing as a coed private school. The latter is St George's Bloomsbury which, several decades ago, just missed out on demolition in a grandiose and, this being England, unexecuted scheme for extending the British Museum precinct southwards. It has also been a venue for musical performances by a certain former RIBA president. The latter has nothing to do with its current state of decay. The Anglican Church's indifference to Hawksmoor's design plus that body's stupendously disastrous investment policy are two primary causes. The New York-based World Monument Fund site, where some of this is reported, intones grimly that 'the cost [of tarting up its t op 100 buildings] is modest compared to the terrible price of failure'. Modest? What then is restraining the firm which runs the private education facility in that lavish palace in a wonderful landscape which is Stowe, from dipping into its profits for a 'modest' contribution. Ah, so that's what 'terrible price' means.

Sky high

What sends Britain's preservation organization, English Heritage, into a quivering, collective frenzy? The word 'skyscraper'. They lead such dull lives wringing their hands at the modern age. So here, just for them is www.skyscrapers.com.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail].