Note: I have had difficulty finding biographical material on historical archtiects, as well as on women in the field. University of Sydney's Garry Stevens writes on the "great men" phenomenon in architecture; see Architecture Australia's review of Stevens's book Circle or this discussion of women in architecture on his website, which estimates that only ten percent of Australia's architects are women.

Aardvark Guide to Contemporary Melbourne Architecture, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (also on CD-ROM)

As discussed, Aardvark has two major sections; I will focus here on its alphabetical index of architect and firm names. Names are arranged in a clickable alphabetical list. Records include staff education and professional experience, projects, and a bibliography. If the Aardvark collection includes any of the architect's buildings, a thumbnail image of that project is linked to the building's Aardvark record. The index contains about 70 entries, providing a focused list of the Melbourne practitioners who most contributed to to the architectural developments of the 1970s and 1980s (which is the era Aardvark covers). The images also encourage visual comprehension of architects' works.

Australian Directory of Architects and Building Designers

Part of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects site, this directory enables the user to search for architects by area of practice, specialized experience, and location, as well as by name. Listings provide contact information (including email and website), areas of practice, and any projetcs reviewed by the RAIA. Easy to use and easy to read. One of the more pragmatic resources listed here, this site is designed for clients searching for archtiects suitable for specific projects. However, I have found this site useful in exploring what types of projects various architects are involved in - education, conservation, tourism, etc.

L'Erma dB Design: Melbourne Architects

Alphabetized and linked list of some major Melbourne architects and firms. Although there's nothing you won't find on either Aardvark or the RAIA/ADABD sites, the strength of this resource is that all of the archtiects mentioned have websites and are linked from the page. If you enjoy reading L'Erma's essays, you will enjoy paging through some of these sites too.

Halftime

Melbourne's volunteer-run discussion group that "aims to promote architectural awareness and discourse." Its artsy front page turns out to be a bit of a false promise: there's not really a lot of content in this site. I have included it for review because many other architecture sites mention it, and the Halftime group itself seems to have played an important role in Melbourne's architectural dialogue in the last few decades. The most worthwhile feature to non-members is a searchable index of architect presentations, which lets users see the title of talks given by different Melbourne practitioners as far back as the mid-1970s, giving a good sense of who's doing (or interested in) what. Unfortunately, abstracts or transcripts of presentations are not currently available. Users can also read the membership list and receive mailings about upcoming events and talks.

Ashton Raggatt McDougall

A standard architecture practice site with biographies and project and award lists, although with less textual and visual description of projects than some of the others. Instead, ARM provides a statement of their philosophy, namely that Australia's architectural "cringe" - a mindset that most projects are inherently constrictive in budget and culture - is an illusion, and that ARM is ready and willing to be innovative, exciting, and proud. ARM has certainly demonstrated this ideal in their projects like Storey Hall, and on this site readers can explore project images to see how well ARM delivers.

Robin Boyd

Former Labor politician John Button's piece "The Best Kind of Nationalist" in The Age (December 25, 2000) describes and contextualizes the importance of architect Robin Boyd and his best-known publications. Australia's Home was a sociological look at the implications of the suburban lifestyle, and The Australian Ugliness criticized urban aesthetics and contemporary national identity. In Button's article, we see how influential Boyd's ideas were to a country defining itself and to individuals learning how to live critically in their built environment. While there is nothing here about Boyd's buildings, we learn by Boyd's works and thoughts the fundamental concept that good architecture is sensitive to its environments and its inhabitants. Button eloquently demonstrates how, through empathy and involvement, Boyd was a good architect - and a good Australian.

Summaries of Australia's Home and of a recent biography of Boyd are available from the University of Melbourne Press.

Denton Corker Marshall

This Australian and Pacific region design firm has been winning RAIA awards for its high-profile Melbourne projects since the mid-1980s. Recent construction includes City Link, Exhibition Centre, and the Melbourne Museum; click "Portfolio" on the main page to see the list. Each project has a text description and a variety of screen-size images. The site is wildly out of date - there is only one photo of the Melbourne Museum, shown under construction - which to a large extent doesn't really matter, because most of this information can be found elsewhere. The site remains valuable for being the architects' vision of themselves and of their projects. People love to discuss what DCM has done to Melbourne, and here we get to see what the architects envisioned.

6º

Beautiful, fun, clever website from the firm 6º. Here impressions seem to be worth more than text, but that doesn't detract from the impact of this site. 6º has emphasized the importance of design and of the architectural process (see "People" and "Process"). Each project has a snippet description and an image. The firm's projects are under "Current," "Folio," and "Degrees / Archive," and most of them have the architects' statement of the goals and requirements of the project and how they met them. Warning: this site takes several minutes to load, but they give you a geometry-based game to play while you wait (and, as part of this integrated site, the gamepieces form the navigation theme for the rest of the site). Maybe a site is worth a thousand words.