Sutherland Lyall roams the web before donning his midsummer druidic garb.

Slitheryn

Living Website Treasure, Eric Morehouse, has just sent me another site with the enigmatic note 'You'll like this'. 'This' is the site of the Swedish practice of Gert Wingardh at www. [Wingardhs.sub.+] se. Yon can't not like a bloke who says simply, 'Wingardhs is committed to the artistic and poetic dimensions of architecture. We always try to transcend the ordinaries of the brief.' Makes all that 'philosophy' windbagging you see on so many architectural websites seem what it is. Remind me again about that bit in Don't Make Me Think about the difference between Your and your designer's point of view and the viewer's. You two are ' thinking "great literature" or at least "product brochure" when the user's reality is much closer to "billboard going by at 60 miles an hour".'

But the site. Even stock-still you could miss it. On the home page there's a faint grey line near the bottom of the screen with, when you bury your nose in the screen, some liny words in pale grey: news', 'projects', 'wingardhs', 'search'. You can barely see anything. When you click on one of these the sliding madness starts. More categories appear, the words slide across and move to below the line and you click almost randomly and more lines of text, some in red, appear and you click on 'projects' and three medium images appear. The right one moves slightly and eventually you get it that clicking on die left one and then letting go moves everything to the right and ... Oh, you accidentally discover that you can zoom in and out if you click on the right mouse button and ... Despite the encouraging early start this is so not a Don't Make Me Think site. But I'm not a potential client and as Morehouse hoped, I really like it even if, and perhaps because, it has clearly been designed during those long sunless nights when the only other thing moving outside is the slow unfolding of the streamers and curtains of the aurora borealis reflecting on the surface of that silent, snow-girt land.

Clarity

There is a tendency for architects to want to talk up the projects they have selected for their websites. But this sub-estate-agent-ese accompanies images of their projects. So even quite simple-minded people can make their own minds up about whether the work is actually 'exciting' or innovative or 'contextual'. Happily we're starting to see a number of websites of young practices which haven't ground through the PR consultant mill and have decided, or don't know better than to tell it like it is. One such is Ullmayersylvester Architects at www.ullmayersylvester.com. It's a really refreshing site with readable thumbnails on a white background, succinct text (never more than 30 words long), and the oeuvre complete all on one scrollable page. OK they're young. Click on a building, and you get a bigger image, a selection of more images and plans and sections, an expanded text and basic data - and awards. It's a simple, precise, consistent and standard layout with lots of white space. Not much thinking involved lor the visitor which makes you like it a lot.

Eye Swivelling

Mangera Yvars is a practice whose principals come from stints at the studios of Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield and now operate from Barcelona and London. And, although you'd expect it, given that lineage, it's not half bad. And at first glance so is the site.at www.myaa-arq. com. It. has a dark grey home page with the unusually configured MYAA logo and biggish thumbnails of buildings slideshowing to its left. Below this you watch the latest practice achievements spelled out in four lines of big white sans serif running type. You have the choice of Castellano or English. Click on 'English' and the logo changes to a cloud of enigmatic red dots with an admirably brief list of the site's sections: 'projects', 'type', 'name', 'size', 'year' and so on. But before that, you tell yourself that the red dots must have some function. So you click on one. Nothing. Nor on the next. Then suddenly the next one sprouts a stalk.Vertically. Aaaargh. And then you find bits of vertical navigation text, on all the other pages: when you go the conventional route of 'projects', 'type', name', etc it may be a neat row of as many as 10 names in tiny (no you can't change the type size) eye-swivelling type. Hey guys, if the good lord had intended us to read sideways type he would have stacked our second eye in our foreheads directly over the other one.

Random sources

And here's a bit of fun from Romanian visual artist Alex Dragulescu, at www.sq.ro/spamarchitecture.php which has a spam architecture page. It's a bunch of 3D computer images generated from all kinds of input: junk email, patterns, keywords and rhythms found in texts. Dragulescu is also developing a similar application which generates experimental graphic novels based on text harvested from blogs. Writers of the above windbag 'philosophy' sections for architectural websites need strain their minds no longer.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]