Sutherland Lyall nimbly steers his magic carpet through the nebulous and confusing post-modern clouds of the internet.

History as bunk

Here in Britain we would eventually have come across Complexity and Contradiction ourselves but the defining moment was actually a short series of lectures which Santa Barbara architectural historian, David Gebhard, gave at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Architectural Association in the early 1970s about the book and the then-startling propositions of the Scott-Brown/Venturi/Moore connection. PoMo in England followed and the rest is history with Venturi and Scott Brown as its imperial couple. It's odd then, that the 'who we are' page of the Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates site at www.vsba.com has what looks like a revision of the familiar history. It comes in the form of a callout from a 1998 piece in Architectural Record which reads thus: 'In some ways it would have been better if they hadn't written about it. They might never have been credited with unleashing Postmodernism, a charge comparable to calling Thomas Edison the father of disco.' Then, when you click on a big, somewhat Gilbert and Georgian button containing the mug shots of the pair and the heading 'In your face' (Oh, sorry it's a fruit machine display), there is a report of a Scott Brown lecture in which she 'debunked the many misconceptions about the firm's work, including the widespread perception of the couple as the parents of postmodernism.' So, just when you thought you knew the history you had just been through, it turns out to be bunk.

The site is a mix of visual jollity and heavy seriousness. Keep your volume up and click on 'projects'. Bomp, bang, klud, and down drops a set of categories, 'academic', 'civic', 'planning', 'exhibitions', that sort of thing, all in different versions of the same sans serif typeface. Click on 'residential' and clunk-clunk, up comes thumbnails of various past schemes which scroll past right back to the beginning of the practice and circa 1960. There is nothing cool and discreet about this site, praise the lord, although the need to slide sideways in the 'highlights' section is really irritating--but doubtless extremely good for us. You always want sites, especially ones as big as this, to have a good search engine. But, as here, there will always be some wretched reviewer who types in such words as pomo (no result) and postmodern for which there is one result. It is on the sub-site for the Vanna Venturi house--but actually in connection with 'many postmodern high-rise buildings'. Odd that. Or, in view of the above, perhaps not. But hey, don't miss it.

Musical chairs

One site difficult to miss (because his PR people mailed practically everybody in the world, including the president of the Royal Society) is that of Rafael Vinoly Architects at www.rvapc.com. It's another horizontal slider. In fact, there are two sliders on the home page whose speed and direction you control, rather uncertainly, with your mouse. It's quite mesmerizing in the way that very bright lights randomly flashing in your face is mesmerizing. When you put the cursor arrow on one of the images, up comes the name of the project and off the strip judders, now unreadably, in the opposite direction to the one it was travelling in initially. Maybe it's not quite like that, but you don't necessarily want to go back to check any more than you want to check on the precise sequences of your last game of musical chairs. One way to stop the sliding is to click decisively on a thumbnail and the strips vanish and a nice big image of the scheme pops up. You click on one of the arrows in the 'images box' and up comes a new illustration. All this stuff has the unlooked-for result of concentrating your attention on the technique and not the architecture, leaving you hoping Vinoly might get things calmed down--as soon as possible.

A nano brick in the wall

There was an article in Wired a couple of months ago entitled 'Smart Bricks or a Dumb Idea'. At the time of writing it was still at www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59319,00.html. It reported how Dr Chang Liu, a nice looking young bloke (there's a mugshot on the site) is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His smart brick comes with sensors which measure such boring but important aspects as temperature, vibration and movement. What you do is build a smart brick into your wall and when the earthquake rumbles or the wall seems set to fall down or whatever, you, er, know about it or as Liu puts it, you get a 'holistic, real-time picture of the strength of a building'. One grumpy engineer-critic points out that 'For one, bricks are now used as a facade rather than a load-bearing element.'

I guess he has a point. But all the stuff discussed in this story--including smart dust, smart lofts (inevitably), smart houses and the like--are topics about which architects are soon going to have to be cognisant. A warning though. Kris Pister coined the definitive phrase 'smart dust'. He says. 'It was entirely tongue-in-cheek, but it caught on and I'm stuck with it. There's something important underneath it, but I don't think anyone can tell you what a smart building will be.'

Merry Munich munchkins

Time for a revisit and the lucky site is www.amatter.com. Actually it's the visitor who is lucky because this is a terrific site, chock full of goodies both of architectural and related matters such as the Venice Biennale, Alessi architecture, mysteries made of paper and cardboard by Thomas Demand, the work of architects Benedikta Scheibenzuber, Rolf Kretschmer and Jonas Schmidt and the issue of fashion as sculpture, to mention just a few. The site is based in Munich but is written in English and you can subscribe to a free monthly email update. It's great.

Clever convolutions

I'm indebted to Architects' Journal reviews editor Andrew Mead for www.coleccioncisneros.org which has just won an Industrial Designers Society of America award. As the convoluted title hints, this is a site for specialists--and for Spanish, Portuguese as well as English speakers. Be prepared for a slowish start even with broadband and turn the volume up. It's not a site for emulation but I think you'll like it as much as the IDSA, Mead and I did.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]