FAT features

For a spit second you think that the FAT site ( http://fashionarchitecturetaste.com ) starts off with one of those pointless landing pages. But no. It’s just a rather sparse page with a delicate, modestly  rococo-esque  cartouche whose spindliness betokens a certain irresulution. Up there under the practice name where you should have looked in the first place, are those old navigation trusties:  ’about :: architecture :: urban design :: interior / exhibition :: design / art :: research / other :: news  . Confusingly, below there is a heading ‘Practice Profile’. Underneath is a cheerful ‘Welcome to FAT, purveyors of architecture of character and distinction.’ plus a four line note about recent architectural successes. And then below are some more links People :: Press :: Download Brochure.It’s confusing because when you click the overhead navigation heading ‘about’ you get a slightly expanded version of much the same thing including the links.

The really intriguing thing is the ‘Download Brochure’ link. You see far to many architectural websites which are little more than electronic versions of office brochures. This, on the other hand is a web-savvy site: You want the brochure? Click here and in a minute you have a cool pdf of the practice’s recent work. The only other time I can think of a practice offering something of that ilk was Fletcher Priest at www.fletcherpriest.com . They thought about providing a download of their terrific brochure but decided against because there was no way they could control print quality. So they did it round the other way and offered the whole website on a memory stick. Fletcher Priest IT overlord Pero Matacevic reports wryly that no one took up the offer.

Back at FAT, you naturally click on architecture.  And back come the memory of the Mexicans  Jsa of our previous posting. Here, instead of the orderly sets of three by three grids of selectable thumbnails, is as five column-wide grid with, currently six rows. As with  Jsa there are similar grids for urban design and other activities. You click on them and up come further and better particulars – including the essential name, location and date though stupidly for something you want prospective clients to look at, you mostly have to search for the client’s name. Never mentioning the contract sum looks a tad coy.

Architecture

Castle Park Retail	The Villa Public Hall	Grote Koppel Mixed Use	Bentley Library Library	Lindsay Road Housing
Liverpool Pavilion Retail/Cafe	The Belvedere Eco-Housing	CIAC Eco-Housing	Islington Square Eco-Housing	Sint Lucas School

This column rarely comments on the architecture but because FAT is a supercharged version of the early CZWG it’s difficult not to really enjoy the integration of the carefully managed simplicity of the site and its structure with the exhilarating architecture. A colleague of mine hates it.

Ends

Spotting the X

Last time I took a pop at Js^a for its useless pre-Home page landing page and the suspicion that it was a diversionary tactic to disguise the slow loading up of images. It actually took several minutes because you had to load up Adobe’s Flash Player – unnecessarily it turned out. The irony was that Flash sites are inherently slow image loaders so it felt a bit like belonging to a Chinese family which had just been charged for the cost of the bullet used to execute a favoured but criminal son. Eventually when you got to Js^a‘s Home page and I’m not going to mention the hassle potential clients will have to go through to keyboard that solitary superscript ^a and then un-superscript the subsequent text) when you get to the home page and stuff gradually appears – there is this quite neat idea of having the projects as square thumbnails in a three by three grid. Click any of them and a much bigger version appears on the right. Click on that and more details and images appear. Go back (and I’ll come to that in a minute) to the basic Project page, click on ‘Our Projects’ and you get a list of building types. Click on any of these and up comes the three by three grid of thumbnails. There aren’t always nine examples for each building type but you don’t mind that because everything is nice and consistent.

Up to a point. Your trouble starts when you try to get back to where you were before. Just when you were beginning to quite like the site you discover is has abolished your browsser’s controls including the crucial Back button –according to several authorities the most used button on any site. Hmmm.You eventually notice a yellow X up there on the right and out of curiosity give it a click. Ahhh. This is Js^a‘s interpretation of the Back button. Trouble is that nobody else I know of uses a solitary X to indicate ‘Back’.

But that grid of thumbnails is faintly familiar FAT, I think has something like it so I’ll take a look next week.

Ends

Diversionary tactics?

This column’s current bête noire is the web site landing page. It’s horseless carriage stuff: that confused in-between state you get in any technology transfer – like when the early motor cars looked like horse-drawn carriages but with tillers ( think back to front boats) instead of reins and horses. In the website world the transfer is often, mistakenly, from book to website.

Mistakenly? you ask. What better model than the book which has been around for millennia?  Books have title pages. So should web sites. Right?

Wrong. Just as motor cars aren’t glorified hansom cabs, so websites aren’t glorified books. Or, for that matter, brochures. If you need a technology transfer model maybe look at newspapers where you get the big events up there on the front page. They don’t have or need landing pages. Remember Steve Krug’s ‘billboard seen from a car doing sixty’.

There must be exceptions to this I-hate-landing-pages position. For example Mexico City practice JSa http://jsadd.com  has a bi-lingual site so its landing page is a logo of the practice with ‘Entrar’ and ‘Enter’ discreetly below. Aha, you think, this neatly sets you up before entering the full unsullied glory of the site. And look, there is a little notice underneath which says the site requires a Flash player. Neat. More setting up. Click on this and you are transported to the Adobe download site. Halfway through the promised two minute download time you suddenly ask yourself if Flash Player isn’t already installed on your box. A few clicks and you discover you’ve downloaded it twice before. In similar circumstances. Can’t a site detect whether you have Flash Player installed?

I don’t know. But by now it’s around four minutes since you first hit the site and you still haven’t managed to get into it. Then you think, ‘Flash…slow loading.’ Is all this a smart diversionary tactic n which the images secretly load up in the background while you faff about?

CRASH LANDING

Landing pages – those really irritating pages you get before you’re allowed into the site. One type of landing page is characterised by a patronising coolness, a a kind of  minimalism which effectively says, OK, Man, perhaps we’ll let you in to do the mundane navigation stuff.  The other involves Flash image trick displays, too often with those mendacious little ‘just loading’ worms and clocks. After a week on  the Web everybody knows that these signify the presence of really dumb coding – or the use of Flash. Or both. Almost all landing pages are an impediment inspired by vanity.

Bates Masi’s landing page at http://batesmasi.com  is of the former type although bland rather than cool is what you’d call it. And pointless. Anyway you click the logo and up comes a home page with the navigation strip in a block up in the top left-hand corner.  On the right hand side reasonably big images of the work relentlessly flash past.

Either you like slide shows or you find them overly-controlling and, of course, patronising: ‘Hey. You, viewer. You’re going to get an eyeful whether you like it or not.’ I think architects do it because they are trained to be control freaks and also for atavistic reasons: these electronic versions hark back to the post-holiday slide show involving  piles of slides, Carousel projectors, bed sheets and guests sidling off with suddenly discovered excuses about the babysitter.

What slide-show fans forget is that the Web isn’t a book nor yet a movie. As Steve Don’t Make Me Think Krug aptly describes it, it’s  more a billboard viewed from a vehicle moving at sixty miles an hour. Unless the slides are of extremely sexy buildings nobody has to watch through to the end. And so they don’t.

Not only is the Web not a book, computer screens are landscape format. For some reason Bates Masi has decided otherwise and its projects pages have portrait orientation. That means you have to scroll down to see every last thing. Do you? Of course not. You want to get on to the next thing. Which in this case is the navigation.

I’m not going to try to explain this beyond reporting that it involves minuscule super-wide-screen thumbnails which slide about, larger thumbnails of the same image and finally medium sized images. If you play your cards right you can get the first two  sliding in and out as you run your cursor up and down the navigation strip like a pianist running a thumb up and down the keyboard. Mad fun if you’re not busy. I suppose. But not an awful lot of use if you’re trying to persuade the world that you are the architects it’s been dreaming about..

Bates Masi + Architects WebDoc Protocol Score **

Long time at it and still..

Arcspace at www.arcspace.com has been around for a decade. As ArcNewsNow at http://www.archnewsnow.com (or is that just a link?) it offers a daily email feed whose really irritating feature is that it runs a list of teasers and then makes you go through them again in a second section of urls which link you directly to the original story. Why not do it all in section one? you ask once a day. But Arcspace itself is a traditional template blog in the sense of having ads down the left side, captions, more accurately standfirsts, and big thumbnail down the middle plus a really comprehensive list of links to other architectural sites down the right. Click on a caption or image and you are taken to the full story with, hopefully, lots more images. It’s the technique which, among others, Dezeen at www.dezeen.com has emulated with great success. You like Arcspace simply because it has interesting stuff which is instantly accessible. No thinking involved.

 

Surf’s up

Wild miscellany

There’s this bloke, ex-architecture student Nick Blair, standing on the roof of a lift-slab warehouse somewhere in the US dropping named eggs on to the pavement below. Named eggs? There is also a report on a German design competition for taps. There is that Berlitz ad with a German coastguard responding to a Mayday call from an sinking English ship: ‘Vat are you sinking about? he asks the desperate English mariners. There is a report on how a Canadian company is researching whale flippers in the cause of better fan blades. And there is the recent Mark Newson show at New York’s Gagosian gallery and this Tuesday’s instant hagiography from the BBC’s Alan Yentob. I think this all started on Everything I Think About at http://thingithink.tumblr.com, but some of it was on Core 77 [www.core77.com/blog], the ‘Industrial Design Supersite’, where there was also an ace sofa by Phillip Grass. And now I’ve lost Blair, he on the roof. But it doesn’t matter because this stream of consciousness across a clutch of blogs and sites is one of the things which you can do only on the web. Dive in.010308

Five columns better

Dexigner delights weekly
Every week I get a news feed from Dexigner [ http://www.dexigner.com ]. Naturally there’s quite a lot about design but there is sufficient architecture-related stuff to make it a a good read. It claims 1.2million unique visitors monthly so obviously a lot of designers read it too.

It’s run by its ‘sole proprietor’, industrial designer Levent Ozler with designers Senay Gokcen and Gulsen Sizyek as editors. If you live round about where I do, that sounds unmistakably Turkish – although it’s New York-based and the content is resolutely international. The format is a bit unsettling. Not so much the five-column layout – well yes five is a tad unnerving – but the fact that the leftmost column is right up against the left hand edge of your screen leaving a wide white column down the right. You immediately worry that it’s cocked up your monitor. Not so. The right hand strip accommodates any enlargement of text. Yes. You can actually enlarge the initially small but quite readable san-serif text. But that leftmost column right on the edge… There are five columns to accommodate news about five areas of design including architecture and fashion, Each of the stories, actually heavily edited press releases, is headed by an image. You just scroll down to see what’s what. Here is a site which does exactly what it sets out to do and no more. Couldn’t be simpler. Or more effective.240108

Name, number and rank

Berman site pretty good 

I got this Andrew Berman practice website [ http://www.andrewbermanarchitect.com ] from that eminent and persistent discoverer of architectural sites, Eric Morehouse. You sign up at http://eyecandy-webcandy.blogspot.com/ for his weekly or more frequent email. Berman is based in New York and the site has a neat and neatly organized home page with a single big image of an intriguingly shaped private library in a park with five section headings below. In don’t-make-me-think terms this is the business: you know exactly what to do The downside is that the type is insanely small and not adjustable and, as you find out when you hit ‘projects’, image load-up time can be longer than it should be. It has a slightly superfluous ‘news’ page and in the ‘profile’ section is a ‘philsophy’ page. Breathe easy. This is exactly four short lines. Even the biography, frequently an excuse for self regarding prolixity, does no more than list Yale graduation dates and practice start-up date. You feel very comforted by all this: here is an architect who gets on with doing architecture not bollocksing around. At the very least you’ll put him on the list.0108

Rooftop solarscape

This coming August Southern California Edison (SCE) will start as five year programme generating electricity using an eventual 250 MW of photovoltaic technology. The final scheme will spread over 65 million square feet of southern California industrial rooftops, reports Gizmag [ http://www.gizmag.com/sce-65-million-square-feet-solar-panel-installation/9067/] Cost is set to be to be $875 million – though after five years who knows what it will really be. This news comes on the same day, in the same news feed, that our own Swansea University engineering department announces that it has re-thought the whole photovoltaic thing following research on a completely different topic – the degradation of paint on steel surfaces [http://www.gizmag.com/solar-paint-breakthrough/9065]. The Swansea U boffins reckon to be able (soon) to roller plate steel with photovoltaic whatsit at a rate of 400 sq feet a minute. But what’s this, several days later, but a Japanese firm, Konarka Technologies, using a Fujifilm printer using cartridges loaded with Power Plastic light-to-energy fluid. At the same time New Jersey Institute of Technology is working on carbon nanotubes (what else) printed on plastic sheeting.

In the general rush, three new $400, sub-prime notebooks have been announced since last week, CTL’s 2go [http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/new-business-of-ctl-corporation,337740.shtml] , Intel’s Classmate[ http://www.classmatepc.com] and MSI’s so far un-named $370 jobbie [ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/183279/the-stunning-laptop-that-undercuts-the-eee-pc.html]..

Lego Atom

 

 Lego computer shown by Geekologie

It’s based on a Via Epia nano-motherboard. More interestingly, it’s on wheels. So the whole ensemble can run back and forth across the desk. Setting up a breeze across that hot little CPU chip. No need for fans. Oh. Odd. There are two. 

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/02/29/lego-pc-2.jpg