Ducking and diving like a seal, Sutherland Lyall navigates the waters of the web.

Modest conviction

Dutch architects have been en vogue for the last decade so we happily acceded to the request of Snelder+Snelder+Snelder to take a look at its site at www.snelder.com. The Snelders are Janneke, Michiel and Wim and they make up just less than a third of the 10-person practice which could be tough for the rest in the middle of a family row. I'm not sure what to make of this but the site lists the people who once worked for the practice.

You can't not like the site: there's no archispeak, the Snelders understand the difference between ambitions and reality and take them both seriously; they like craftsmanship; they do budget control, specification and energy calculations and, you'd be surprised if they didn't, do personal attention. Happily all this is stated just about as baldly and clearly as that. The news is that they've just finished a stylish KINZO factory in north Holland, there are A5 booklets which you can buy about them and two of their projects - and you can email, fax or phone them in their home town Bussum just to the cast of Amsterdam and north of Hilversum. (I checked that out on the atlas).

Rapidly-changing images in four boxes represent the practice's completed projects. So irritating is the pace of image change that you soon notice the building-type index on the left and click on, say schools. Peace at last--until two images slide in from left and right and then from the bottom. Whatever, this is, with the exception of the frenetic introductory project images, a pretty good model for small and medium practices: simple to navigate; convincing; modest. Its clear and mercifully brief text assumes that an architectural practice doesn't need to go on with a lot of market-speak, because most sensible clients assume architectural practices are honest, will do the best they can, will design what they want them to and will try not to go over budget. You can also just about work out what kind of architecture you will get--largely orthogonal, skinny sections, horizontal forms and quite a lot of elegance.

Trippingly upon the tongue, er

I recently came across this delightful bit of floss on the Web: 'an experiential, interactive and fluid trajectory creating a compelling professional simulation'. Here was part of a critical evaluation of the website of the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) at www.institute-ny.org. Critic Erik Hemingway and several others were making the second Entablature architecture website awards at http://www.entablature.com/awards.htm. Following recent stern but fair Browser comments about historical revisionism on the Venturi website at www.usba.com it is pleasing to see that Entablature awarded this site its gold medal for 2003. I'm indebted to reader Richard Pain for the tip-off.

But what of Hemingway's 'fluid trajectory' and the IAUS? The latter, you will remember, evaporated in the mid 1980s so this is plainly an attempt to reinvent it. There is a board of trustees, an executive director and a board of great and good advisors. There has, however, been an ominous dearth of news since last December when the web page went online, but it is remarkably simple and direct in construction and its language is clear and happily un-experiential.

The source

Entablature's own website is at www.entablature.com and subtitled 'A Gathering Place for the Architectural Community'. It is actually an architectural information website and is a straightforward commercial-style site. It is laid out with a 'Connections' column down the left and book and product ads down the right, with stories and features down the double-width middle column. Most of these stories are actually links to other story sources such as local newspapers but there's nothing wrong with that. There are several chat rooms (known here as discussion boards), competitions and exhibitions, links to architecture, interior design and landscape schools around the world and to resources such as architects, career education and the like. It's a compact, competent website which seems to be updated daily. The site seems to have been going since its copyright was established in 2000 and its editor is Kris Pettersen. But try as I might, I couldn't discover who or what is behind Entablature. Given the vanity of most website owners, this may represent a refreshing change.

Slow, slow, quickish ...

The other websites which the Entablature judges liked included that of Add Inc (www.addinc.com) whose special effects, silhouette wipes, bouncy arrowheads, controllable panning across thumbnails and sound was almost up to the standard of Rice Daubney (at www.ricedaubney.com.au whence I'm happy to report that last month Carolyn had a baby and the firm has merged with di Carlo Potts). Another Entablature awardee, the Stoss landscape and urbanism site, has this demented line of tiny blue italic type that runs across the middle of the page from left to right, so jerkily that no-one here could at first read more than the odd word--which, after much scrutiny, combined to suggest that 'Stoss' probably means something like 'a kick in the pants'. Who couldn't not like such a site. Its menu of subsidiary pages is scattered across the right hand side of the page. A taxonomist might demur at the chalk and cheese nature of the keywords--from specific projects to the founder's biography and mug shot to ftp and email information. But there are few enough of them for this not to matter.

Quick

Many of the sites given 'honour awards' deploy the device of a little loading gauge to encourage you to stay on board while the images upload. It just about works but probably not when everybody does it. Sound can help here as Colombia student and gold medal winner, Bobby Wei, knows. His site is www.bb8.net and starts off with a bang. Actually it's the opening bar of a huge pounding bass rhythm which comes with the visual choice of connection type: broadband, network and 56K modem. There follows some terrific animated graphics, you click on Wei's mug shot, up come some project titles and ... then it falls flat. Although the graphics are zippy and the sounds incisive, the pictures are so dim and the text so unreadably miniature that all this terrific presentation stuff, and especially the speed with which everything happens, is wasted. You simply can't get at the content largely because you can't change the type size. A real pity--but easy enough to fix.

Cashing in

And finally here's an idea, a bit tacky I admit, for turning a buck during long weeks between house extensions. Your model is the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust Architecture Fantasy Camp, at www.wrightplus.org/events/#camp. This is, the blurb runs, 'For adults who dream of designing a room or building of their own ... Within the magical drafting room of Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park studio, participants work with accomplished architects to plan and design a structure of their own creation. The workshop concludes with the execution of an expertly crafted blueprint drawing.' Insert your own local historic/vaguely famous architect, rent some plausibly historic office space by the week and spend a lot of time hunting out old blueprint frames, linen tracing paper and pounce (powdered talc). If memory serves me correctly, the old guys with their smocks and T square used to expose their blueprints in the sun. So the only down side is the weather.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]