The majesty of it all.

I checked to see why the sound wasn't on when the big red SOM loomed majestically out of the black vdu screen. Where were the trumpets, the choirs? This is the site of the practice which after the Second World War defined Modernism as the official government and corporate style. The modern site is at www.som.com and this opener has five main groups of subjects, with the satellite subsections grouped around them scattered around the respected initials. Click on one of the subtitles and it zooms in at you and develops its own set of satellite subsections. Click on say Newark Penn station and up comes a map and some printable text. Click the Next button a couple of times and there is a civic building which looks exactly like the kind of architecture the early SOM boys were trying to stamp out. But then it goes on and on and on. Leave it alone and eventually the whole thing goes into random mode and changes screens without your intervention. This is an architecture site in its full glory, a juggernaut of a thing which rolls on relentlessly and, should you have the temerity to want to go somewhere else completely different on the site, you have to start all over again because there is no Back button. You want to carp, but when a practice is quite as big and has such an enormous caseload, how can anything it does look less than ponderous--no, majestic.

And here's this month's pleasure: http://www.tokyoplastic.com/drummachine.html.

Turn up the volume to really loud. Enjoy, Incidentally, as we went to press, Tokyoplastic 2 was promised imminently so try out just www.tokyoplastic.com by itself.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]