 |
|
A monthly review of Web design and resources.
By Ken Coupland
April 2002
The Skyscraper Museum <www.skyscraper.org>
Devoted to the study of the high-rise building--past, present, and future--the
Skyscraper Museum's essentially romantic point of view was shaken on September
11. But once past the somber opening page, a colorful site archives the
museum's impressive slate of previously held, current, and upcoming exhibitions.
(At present, events are held at venues around New York pending completion
of the museum's new Battery Park home.) A historical time line shows how
even the earliest skyscrapers--such as the preposterous Singer Tower (1908)--were
roundly criticized for their aesthetic shortcomings. Check out the stunning
animated graphics for "Timeformations," a digital project that
chronologically maps Manhattan's skyscraper districts.
Cyburbia <www.cyburbia.org>
A generic interface can't disguise Cyburbia's substantial offerings. Sponsored
by SUNY Buffalo, the site assembles a large but selective directory of Internet
resources relevant to planning, architecture, urbanism, growth, sprawl,
and other topics related to the built environment. It also contains information
about related mailing lists and Usenet news groups, hosts a bulletin board
with job listings and discussions, and posts daily planning news updates.
Inside the discussion area, Cyburbia Forums, learn why planners don't get
to live in the communities they admire--because their paltry salaries don't
allow them to afford these increasingly popular, and therefore pricey, real-estate
markets.
Virtual Portmeirion <www.virtualportmeirion.com>
Architect and incurable romantic Sir Clough Williams-Ellis began building
Portmeirion, a manufactured village on the coast of North Wales, in the
1920s. How ironic, then, that his vast sentimental folly provided the setting
for The Prisoner, a short-lived but influential TV series about
a Cold War operative confined and terrorized by sinister forces. Today
the town--cobbled together with its creator's laboriously picturesque designs
and older buildings that were shipped piece by piece to the remote location
for reassembly--is a tourist mecca. The Web site offers lodging and travel
information, maps, coastal views, and desultory shots of numerous buildings,
along with links to Prisoner-related sites, where you'll find
better photos of the environs.
Typebox <www.typebox.com>
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, graphic designers Mike Kohnke and Joachim
Müller-Lancé collaborate on this online font shop-cum-design
quarterly that promotes type culture. Addressing a small but increasingly
influential coterie, the fledgling site's seasonal updates look
slight but promising. Typebox offers content ranging from down-and-dirty
insider design tips (a discussion of the proper vertical positioning of
em-dashes) to a lively overview of the tight-knit, and frequently just plain
quirky, international typographic scene. Font showings by the founders,
as well as invited designers, are imbued with a retro-futuristic feel.
LiquidWit <www.liquidwit.com>
Virtual brainstorming? What a concept. LiquidWit aims to field online
creative teams that work together to come up with names, tag lines, logo
concepts, marketing ideas, and more. If it can find an audience, the
service's ingenious and exhaustively detailed interface could stimulate
or stifle the flow of ideas--it's hard to tell which. Failing
that, LiquidWit--not an easy name to grasp or remember--could end up as
yet another Web start-up with noble ambitions and a shaky business model.
Either way the vividly articulated graphics are worth a look for their intelligent
diagramming of the creative process.
Ken Coupland can be reached at
screenspace@metropolismag.com.
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
