Sutherland Lyall takes a deep breath and sniffs the midsummer cyber meadows.

Flying the flag

You have no idea how we wallow in post-Empire tristesse. Non-Brits will have to forgive me for a tiny surge of happiness at two little flags signifying language options on the home page at www.chdeportzamparc.com. For once the English language icon is a miniature Union flag not the Stars and Stripes. On the other hand Christian de Portzamparc has probably offended all his US surfers. For the discerning viewer the site's real offence is in making the screen full size and so not amenable to usual browser functions, such as BACK, at the same time as not providing an internal Back button. This is the See Naples and Die approach, based on the fact that you will simply want to close down your broadband connection after witnessing these glories. And possibly your life support system as well. It is not quite as bad as that as you soon discover that clicking on a heading at the bottom of the screen often produces a pop-up table of contents. Headings include Big Buildings, Towers and, charmingly, The Poem of Place. What Anglo Saxon architect would dare to use a category such as Poem of Place?

Pro bono architecto

I'm probably seriously not up to speed on this but Santa Cruz, Ca. practice Public Architecture at www.publicarchitecture.org is a member of the 1% Solution movement. It offers pro bono architectural services to the needy. Despite the possibilitya of horning out young architectural firms from their early small-scale commissions, or possibly because, lots of US practices have signed up. Not surprisingly, from an economic point of view, Public Architecture does fee-earning work as well as its current project to provide shelters for day labour pick-up locations. Our local DIY superstore, where such people from the Eastern Bloc gather every morning, could do with one of those. My surge of empathy, social consciousness, and so on was checked when it became clear that this practice's interest in helping disadvantaged people didn't extend to those of us with medium-poor eyesight. The text size is unadjustable. Also the home page has this irritating band of randomly merging and sliding images across the middle of the home page like demented Venetian blinds in a slow-motion breeze. Why? you ask. Still Public's founder, John Peterson, had just won the Jefferson Award and good luck to him. But as I always say, web sites are too important to be left to the architects.

Sutherland Lyall is al [e-mail]