In elegiac mode, Sutherland Lyall presents his coin to the ferryman of the CyberStyx.

Content is king in the Land of FAT

FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) has taken on the mantle of CZWG Architects (www.czwg.com) as maverick-in-chief to the UK architectural establishment. The practice has a website at http://fashionarchitecturetaste.com--a model of how to be beguiling, talented and lucidly unpretentious. This is a serious contender for the Don't Make Me Think (www.sensible.com) site prize. Equally intriguing are the partners' personal blogs. Charles Holland has Fantastic Journal at http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com, and Sam Jacob has Strange Harvest at www.strangeharvest.com, whose subtitle is 'On Architecture, Design, Art, Culture, Beauty. Truth, Paranoia, Fear & Love'. (You don't often hear love mentioned in our fraternity. More's the pity.) So many architects equate obscure language with depth and seriousness. These two, like their FAT partner Sean Griffiths, write with perceptiveness and clarity--which is why they often appear in our sister publication, The Architects' Journal. Being blogs, these sites are based on standard templates, which means the design issue has been resolved and their proprietors can concentrate on what is important: content.

Building the definitive database

This looks a bit like a house ad, but take a look at the World Buildings Directory online database at www.worldbuildingsdirectory.com. It's the preliminary spin-off from last year's World Architecture Festival, containing the 700-plus entries for that apparently wildly successful event in Barcelona. It ticks all the usability boxes partly because it boasts an easy-to-follow category breakdown. It starts off as a two-column, bloglike layout with the title and category options on the left. When you make a successful search, you get a selection of thumbnails down the right. Click on one of them and up comes a bigger image with five alternatives as thumbnails below, together with the texts submitted by the architects. So you only get the architect's version, but hey--it's still the beginning of a massive contemporary world archive.

Can't live by graphics alone

I can't tell if architectural group AH Asociados did any testing of its site, www.ahasociados.com. Maybe not, because image download times are dire. You begin with a page of very elegant white text on black, with a vertical orange line dividing the language options (Spanish and English). When you click either, a new, black screen pops up (oddly, leaving the home screen behind) and along slides an orange line, which thickens to acquire that weasel word: loading. Eventually, you get a strip of black and white thumbnails, a simple navigation box on the top left of the page and the big image of the day, which is highlighted by being in colour in the thumbnail strip. I searched, but could find no details of the buildings apart from the credits. But since they are quite elegant, as is the site in its design, maybe that's all that's needed. This is also one of those sites that removes your browser toolbars and doesn't have a back button. A real web designer said to me when I asked about doing Norman McLaren-style introductory animated graphics: 'Sure I can do it. But why? It will just be in the way of people getting at the information.'

Nuts

A colleague directed me to architect Gabor Bachman's insane site at www.bachman.hu (the .hu means he is Hungarian). I say insane because, superimposed across a monochrome background incorporating the wild-eyed features of presumably, Gabor himself (plus a big, suggestive nut on the left), is a gyrating mass of coloured balls which, from time to time, acquire temporary labels. I won't go on, but let me urge you to take an amused look at what I now think is an attempt to suggest that a mass of ideas is jostling around in old Gabor's brain. And damnit, isn't that exactly what architects' brains are supposed to be like?

Envoi

This is the last Browser column in the AR. My warm thanks to everybody over the last few years who has written in ... some crossly, of course. I have to pay special tributes to Kansas architect and the architectural blogosphere's living treasure, Eric Morehouse, at www.eyecandywebcandy.blogspot.com And to Steve Parnell, now running The sesquipedalist at www.sesquipedalist.com for that wonderful first blog message: 'We love doing architecture." Oh, and the anonymous Alice the Architect at http://alicethearchitect.blogspot.com who stopped communicating when I suggested that, for all I knew, she might actually be a six-footer with a beard and bad habits. Her blog is still great. The bible, according to my pro web designer friends (and me) is still Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think: A Common-Sense Approach to Web Usability (New Riders, 2005). If you would like to keep reading browser items, tune in to www.browsertwo.co.uk whence you can hook up to a free weekly feed. Hooked up or not, it's been really nice writing for you.

Adieu.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]