Shimmying for Denmark.

Design review director at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, Peter Stewart, suggested I take a look at the site of Danish architects 3XN whose housing he had admired. He found their cheerfully wacky site at the admirably brief address www.3xN.dk. If you take the Web seriously it is almost worthwhile changing your practice name to something short and easy like this. You can hear clients musing about which architect they should contact and going for the one with the shortest name. Perhaps. Whatever, Stewart was right about wacky. Yet that is the graphic stuff: the content is serious enough. The home page is a white page with a five line contents list up on the left and a brown blob in the middle. Naturally you start to stroke the blob and it suddenly expands and pulsates like the exposed viscera of a panting puppy. Move the cursor across it and you get glimpses of buildings between irregularly spaced vertical Venetian blinds. Persist and even click the mouse and the image takes up the whole space of the blob and you then get a kind of slide show. Fed up with dodging about like this you click on 'architecture' and the word oozes a little and gets bigger. Click on the word 'category' and a grid of brown dots shimmies into place, some of the dots bigger than the rest. You click on a bigger dot and the whole grid expands toward you and there is a little circular thumbnail. A circular thumbnail. Now there's a thing. But look, take a peek for yourself and enjoy the mastery of ooze, shimmy and bloop. In an architectural context of course.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]