Sutherland Lyall indefatiguably forages and ferrets for cyber fodder.

On site at last

Pritzker Prize laureate Jorn Utzon has recently lived a quiet, blameless and mainly website-less life, latterly in Majorca. Now with his renewed involvement, admittedly at a distance, with the icon of Australia, there's a new site about Utzon Associates at www.utzon.dk and by the time you read this it will hopefully be a bit more developed that it was last month. You thought it was just Jorn. But no, there's the late Aage, the naval architect dad, sons Jan and Kim, daughter Lin, grandchildren Jeppe and Kickan - all architects and whose brief biographies are on the site together with images and, in some cases, brief descriptions of the Utzon office oeuvre. Needless to say the Sydney Opera House is first on the list. In the References section only one book is mentioned, by Welsh School of Architecture's Richard Weston. Its price is listed as 1000 Kroner which according to my currency converter website (at www.xe.com) is around [euro]134. No mention of Peter Murray's recent The Saga of the Sydney Opera House which is based on Arup archives. But hey, why run a site and bark at yourself?

Plymouth Ho. Hum.

An evangelist of plain and simple usability in architectural websites, I find myself in the odd position of being enchanted with sites which don't necessary follow the puritan form-function, economy of means, clarity-not-obscurity position which seems to be essential for marketing websites--which is to say the normal architectural site. So I'm only half hesitant in suggesting you look at www.arch-os.com the site of Arch-OS--or is it I-DAT, either of which belongs to the University of Plymouth. According to the blurb, 'Arch-OS represents an evolution in intelligent architecture, interactive art and ubiquitous computing'. For the record, the latter is an idea formulated by Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in 1988 which is sometimes associated with wearable and mobile computing and more certainly with the idea of the dissolution of the high-tech high status computer gizmo in favour of calm technology--which, er, maybe means unobtrusive computer technology everywhere. People who cut big holes in the sides of their computer cases, stuff them with flashing lights and coloured cables and use fan-cooled water-based radiators to keep the temperature of their overclocked processors at an even level, are probably not very sympathetic to the idea. Whatever, the whole U of Plymouth site is a series of rambles through less and more (in)coherent propositions about architecture and design, illustrated by recent projects. One such is Flock, which uses Arch-OS vision and sound tools to create a flock of birds high in an atrium of a university building which wheel around making cries--all depending on the movement and numbers of people in the atrium. There's a whole lot more of this kind of thing around the site and, although much of it is architectonic rather than specifically architectural, it is quite often great fun. You are not entirely sure that its attractions are due to the nice ideas or the slightly mad language adopted in an effort to avoid discussing anything concrete and therefore banal. Take cybrids, those hybrids of physical and electronic ... But look, just try it out and see what you think.

Cool dude

Guy Nordenson is a wizard New York structural engineer in the architect-friendly mould of British engineers such as Matthew Wells, Chris Wise and Tim MacFarlane. If that sounds a tad smug and parochial it's partly because it is and partly because Nordenson is a sort of former honorary Brit: he founded the New York outpost of the mighty Arup machine and ran it for a decade until he set up on his own in 1997. His site is at www.nordenson.com and has one of those horizontal moving rows of recent projects which on some sites seem designed merely to irritate. This one is inoffensive but when you click on the travelling image of, say, Richard Meier's Church of the Year 2000 in Rome, you merely get the same moving slide show, this time vertically and with some basic details on the side. Catching and clicking on the image here produces a page with nine expandable thumbnails and a piece of well-written, jargon-free descriptive text. It would be nice to be able to scroll it at will but you have to click on an up or down scroll arrow at the bottom. It's all a bit measured and denies you the right, which should be inalienable for surfers, to scoot through a site at your own fast pace. Otherwise this is an exemplary and modest site from which you come away with kindly thoughts.

In the website desert

The aforesaid Arup has a commercial software house, Oasys at www.oasys-software.com. It recently clocked up a runner-up gong from the UK Department for Education and Skills (DES). It was for its site's accessibility: 'good balance of usability and quality design' ran the encomium. Sadly the chief judge complained generally about 'a worrying proportion of the nominated websites [which] failed to meet the most basic requirements for accessibility [including] contrast between text and background. I did a trawl of Oasys for standard evils and came up with at least one 'it's' for 'its,' embarrassingly in the Press section. There were several gratuitous PDF files (I accidentally clicked one and had to wait the standard half hour for Acrobat Reader to deign to open it) but, joy of joys, the text size can be varied by the user. It's not a very interesting site but the topic of software is rarely a bundle of laughs and it does the job it sets out to do.

Lost in space

And finally a site to die for. At least that's what it nearly did for the people to whom I gave the url. Died laughing, that is. It's the site of Space Hijackers Architectural Design Ltd at www.spacehijackers.co.uk/architects. Show it to your web designers too. Especially your web designers.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]