Pillow fight.

The Australian practice with the unmemorable name, PTW, won the recent Venice Biennale special prize for atmosphere with its and Arup's National Swimming Centre for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. PTW's site is at www.ptw.com.au and its opening page features the aforesaid swimming centre, the Watercube, a square building with a flat roof and elevations composed of randomly shaped ETFE pillows. This is a big 150-strong practice based in Sydney and Beijing with offices around south-east Asia including Auckland, where the practice is called Peddle Thorp Aitken. The website is not so much minimalist as laconic. Throwaway even. There is a contents list down the left-hand side covering projects, jobs, contacts, an overly long practice history and an unhelpful search engine. Like far too many website search engines, it is unhelpful because all it offers is to allow you to input a keyword under a couple of possible headings. And that's it. How do you know what you want to search for if you don't know what's on offer. What you really need in a search engine is a few hints about what goodies are to be found on the site. Unsure about this search engine's case sensitivity I tried 'Venice Biennale' and got 'You searched for "Venice Biennale" in "Entire site" which wasn't that helpful or up to date.