Sap rising, spring in the air, Sutherland Lyall looks for signs of cyber life.

Making out

You might think that a url such as www.makarchitects.co.uk refers to the new UK practice make staffed (initially at least) by refugees from the Foster office. I nearly said Norman Foster but you now have to pay an enormous copyright fee to even mention his name. But look, try the above url and sit back for what is probably a Beach Boys track and visuals courtesy of the self-styled Los Angeles premier surf school and the Jimmy Miller Foundation. What's that all about? It's certainly not architects and certainly not co.uk. Adding that all important 'e' and turning the dot co dot uk into a dot com, as in www.makearchitects.com makes, ahem, all the difference. Its home page has a big red rectangle with a white square of text with a changing square image next door. Aaaargh, slide show, you say, although actually it's not all that naff. Whatever, you click on 'practice' and up comes, sigh, 'Philosophy'. Like all architectural 'philosophy' statements this has as much to do with Aristotle, Bertrand Russell and Hegel, as cowpats have to do with pate de foie gras. In despair you click on 'projects'. And blimey. This is a three year old practice and yet the screen is a mass of clickable thumbnails of projects. Horribly cynical, you try to catch out the thumbnails for padding. But no. And then all the staff, dozens and dozens of them in a big patchwork all smiling away. The really amusing thing, amusing given the way make boss, Ken Shuttleworth was Photoshopped off to the edge of that infamous Foster office group photo, is that everybody changes position whenever you revisit this staff page. It happens on the projects page too. OK, all the site now needs, apart from adjustable type size and a massive editing of words, is a bit of that surfing music from its near namesake.

Fantastic voyage

I don't know if a British architect would have the chutzpah to run a home page such as Jean Marie Massaud at www.massaud.com. You start off with a soulful head shot of the said Jean Marie and slowly zoom into his eye and, in the manner of that SF movie Fantastic Voyage you drift through a series of amorphous shapes and then into a world populated with his designs for furniture and door handles and other product design. A giant whale-like airship is involved as well and then some buildings somewhat in the mode of the early Emilio Ambasz and finally, with the flipping shut of design notebook pages, there you are back to the beginning. There is a shorter, clickable version. This takes maybe ten minutes and very neatly fills in that gap before the Big Match on Sunday afternoon. But as one of my colleagues who understates things a lot says, 'verging on the pretentious'. Trouble is that Massaud is quite a designer. But not necessarily of websites.

Hacking it

I'm not sure whether several of my colleagues had sinister motives in suggesting I take a look at two architectural journalist blogs. If I seem to pull any punches it's purely because I write a column in AJ, whose editorship is currently up for grabs and either hack might well be in the editor's seat by the time this appears. Whatever, here goes. The first is dezeen at www.dezeen.com, an online magazine edited by Marcus Fairs, quondam editor of Icon. As you might expect from a pro it's pretty good (really). The issue I'm looking at had the headline 'Condom device wins Most Beautiful award' followed by some images of Hussein Chalayan's Autumn/Winter 2007/8 collection in Paris. There is a good architecture section and I have signed up for the regular feed. I was warned that Kieran Long's site at www.kieranlong.com was a tad me, me, me. And so it is: a list of places he is lecturing at, exhibitions he is curating and that sort of stuff. But me, me, me, is, for some, exactly what blogging is all about. Still, in the toss-up between a magazine with information about new projects and a public diary with ditto, I think I know which is likelier to be widely read. Blame my Calvinist journalistic upbringing.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]