unCurb your enthusiasm.

According to Manhattan's Village Voice, in May last year Lockhart Steele abandoned his gossipy eponymous website for the real estate trade and started up the much more elaborate magazine Curbed.com, at www.curbed.com. It is now an essential daily read for New York realtors. Of what conceivable interest, you snort, are estate agents to us? Well conceivably, an important part of a lot of architects' professional lives involves keeping up with developers and knowing what's what in the realm of flogging space and buildings. More interestingly there is the gossip. Delicious gossip about clients and people in the business. And about architects. Curbed has a special column written under the byline 'Guttersnipe' which is devoted entirely to architectural gossipy stuff. Steele is remarkably coy about who writes for it. One theory in our trade is that staffers on the conservative USA architecture-related mags have become adept at nipping out to the local internet caff when an unprintable rumour comes in. There they can happily and untraceably file the filth on the great and good straight to The Gutter. US libel laws are nothing like our own so it is always fun when UK architectural big beasts get a mention. The evil UK libel laws being what they are, don't expect us to be prepared to repeat any of it. The Gutter happily has its own url at http://gutter.curbed.com.

Sutherland Lyall may be in the gutter but he's always looking at the cyber stars.