Flying down to Rio.

I tried out www.espectro.arq.br to see why eight Brazilian architects/designers decided to do a collective site. One answer seems to be that they haven't yet done a lot and maybe there seemed to be economies of scale. I'm not so sure this was a good idea. The basic graphic structure is a square with nine divisions (the centre one being the main heading). A grey background, naturally. You click on one representative image from the square and up comes the architect's name and a summary of what they do in its own little square. Click again on one and on the left up comes a mugshot and a scrollable biography with three clickable projects on the right-hand side. All that meta-stuff is webly virtuous despite the half-readable text (white on a pale orange, dark orange on a not so pale orange). But the squares all have oh-so-fashionable '60s rounded corners and the colours come from the same era. Yeech you think, trying to stay in period. You take the view that the designers, especially Monica Marcondes with her bioclimatic shell and an intriguing adaptive skin, could well have put up their own sites. And the mugshots? Well this is Brazil and all eight happen to be women.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]