Unflaggingly, Sutherland Lyall tunnels for ore in the huge mountains of cyberworld.

Interventionists found

I know we don't go around plugging Lawrence King's or Thames & Hudson's current new titles lists but that's precisely what I'm doing for CD publisher In-D. It flogs CDs of important, newish architects. It's not a giant stable of up and comers but it includes architects like Will Bruder, Eric Owen Moss, Morphosis, plus some golden oldies in the form of Rudolph Schindler and one or two FLWs. Prices are pretty reasonable at a median of around $30 and some are less. I've sneaked a look at a small sample of the disks themselves and they are great exactly the thing schools and big-picture practice libraries should probably own. Take a look at some samples at www.planetarchitecture.com. There are some names on the home page list such as Frank Israel. Roto, Rick Joy and Scogin Elam Bray, whose CDs you don't seem to be able to buy at the moment--hopefully soon because their web sites are either non-existent or are embarrassingly barren.

Things to come?

With the above shortcomings in mind and with the help of Google, I turned to casting a cheerfully avuncular eye in the direction of joint MIPIM-AR prizewinners, Sydneysiders Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp. I found the home page, it's at www.fjmt.com.au/. And that, er, is that. Just a home page, neatly designed, containing a few pix, email addresses and the practice name. Is this an attempt to emulate the total cool of those superstar architects who eschew the very idea of a website? (Unofficial fan-sites are a different matter, in fact I'd advise everyone to get the office junior to set up an apparently independent site in praise of your practice--no I didn't say that.) Is it a local dementia, fanned by the hot dry winds sweeping across those billions of acres of desert? Or is it the beginning of a popular revulsion by the architectural avant-garde against concentrated electronic marketing? Here at this column we're feeling a tad insecure.

Who they?

We all quite like the odd enigmatic site. But I think if I ever meet the people who designed Xhabitation at www.xhabitation.com I'll probably offer them no more than the chance to put on their own blindfolds before they get ... It may well be that the people who run Xhabitation have done so already although I suspect that they did the site themselves. The 'about us' button produces a statement which includes such sentences, complete with capital letter, as 'Space becomes infinite and Time is never enough.' You think of other more appropriate button names than 'About us'. Like 'Dull cliches'. You cautiously click on 'Interactive' and there is an exaggerated bird's-eye perspective of some orthogonal line forms with bits flashing in green and rows of numerals which change apparently purposefully. Purposefully? No, they just change. You click on one of the four headings, and up come two obscurely tiny thumbnails plus name, client and building website. It's the same when you click 'Architecture' except that 'site' in this section means location, not website. Can you enlarge the thumbuails, which are now in colour? Clicking on anything apart from the navigation bar is like talking to a sulky teen. You give the site up eventually, declining the possibility of an email correspondence and remaining quite uncertain about which country the telephone numbers might relate to--and wondering whether the tiny thumbnails might have been quite as intriguing as you imagined. Still entirely in the dark about who and what Xhabitation is/was/might have been, you hold on to the thought that is some young architectural group's electronic marketing tool. And hope you are wrong.

Catholic spread

The hour after I filed copy last time about Irish Architecture Online (at www.archiseek.com) they added a section about Barcelona, which is still one of the most fashionable design destinations in Europe. With refreshing honesty and slightly dodgy expression, the site director says that, like the Paris guide, 'Barcelona will take a few years to do the architecture of the city justice.' Just to update you, Archiseek.com is 'the international project of Irish-architecture.com' which has discussion forums, architectural competitions and guides to the architecture of Edinburgh, Paris, Tours, Santa Fe--the American one and Winnipeg as well as Barcelona and is one to cherish for the long term.

Interventions

Sorry about the archischoolspeak but 'intervention' really is the correct way to describe much of the content of hacks.mit.edu (note the absence of a www). The local, non-computer, non-journalist, MIT meaning of 'hack' is 'a clever, benign and ethical prank or practical joke.' So what's this site doing here? you ask. Well, it's a bit weak but many of the best MIT hacks involve the local campus architecture, especially the domes of the Rogers and McLaurin buildings. Their summits have provided the loci for, among others, a convincing campus police car complete with flashing light and furry dice--and a Neil Armstrong-style Moon landing complete with small flag. It's in the detail. Then there was the giant R2-D2 robot round the dome. The most architectural of hacks seems to have been the 1992 transformation of a big space (Lobby 7) into the Cathedral of the All-Night Tool (read All-Night Swot) complete with stained-glass windows, pews, confessional and cheap imitations of all the usual kit you get in cathedrals. While it was still erect, two MIT alumni got married by a priest and priestess of Wicca, also alumni. For cultural historians the really interesting thing about the site is that it reveals that the wonderful idea of the Blinkenlights projects in Paris and Berlin last year promoted by the Chaos Computer Club (and noticed in the November 2002 Browser) had really been invented by MIT pranksters who in 1993 converted windows (as Blinkenlights was to) at the top of the Green building on the MIT campus into a giant digital sound meter which continuously reported sound levels from a Boston Pops gig being played just across the river.

If you get fed up with typing the longer urls in Browser, click through www.arplus.com, select 'directory' then 'BROWSER and General Architecture Sites' and there at the beginning are this month's crop of addresses waiting for you to click on. The accumulated browser sites are there too in alphabetical order.

Sutherland Lyall is at [e-mail]