TASCHEN's 1000 Favorite Websites
Where to find the best the web has to offer

Edited by: Julius Wiedemann
2003 Taschen ca-print

Published project by LAb[au]:
Metalab, the official web-site of LAb[au] _ version 1.0 (online until 2006)

About the publication

In the not-too-distant past, the "internet" was a military communication device virtually unknown to civilians. Then in the 1990s came an explosion,a sort of digital big bang, and suddenly everyone began communicating via the world wide web. The web's evolution has proceeded at lightning speed, meaning that today's websites are infinitely more sophisticated and well-designed than their predecessors. When a website gets updated, the previous version generally evaporates into the digital beyond, so it's up to us to preserve and record this fascinating medium. 1000 Favorite Websites brings together—you guessed it—1000 of today's very best websites in the areas of advertising, architecture, art design, digital, erotic, illustration, movies, fashion, photography, and more; each website is presented via screenshots annotated with icons indicating the features of the site (e.g. animation, sound, downloadable material, etc.) Serving as a vital reference for web enthusiasts, this book is also a place marker in the history of the internet and a vibrant catalogue of cutting-edge global web design.

About Metalab 01
page: architecture 130/131

The 'MetaLab' is an interactive graphic database designed as an hyper-textual navigation system throughout LAb[au]'s theoretical writings, research works, artistic and architectural projects. In this setting the networked environment combines the creation of a collaborative environment acting and working on/through the www, LAb[au] , with the articulation of a multidisciplinary network. In order to identify this multi-gateway environment, a graphic charter, the 0/1.label visualized as a common splash screen, has been set up.

Conceived as a general navigation system interconnecting dispatched web sites, it offers project previews (text images) and multiple accesses and reading forms. The combination and interconnection of different indexing forms, space - time - structure and concepts operates as an intertextual comprehension of the projects which can directly be related to a larger investigation on information structuring, display and access, examining the semantic and spatial mutation of architecture by computation and communication processes.

The navigation system combines two different reading forms: a linear, chronological... subject-catalogue, 'header', and a rhizomatic and re-centring card index. The dynamic card index operates by successive centring of displayed topics, which the user can, by clicking on the central topic, extend to a contextual toolbar allowing him/her to get images shots and text cuttings on the related subject. By constantly re-centring on chosen issues, the navigation system allows a continuous reading, interpolating multiple hyperlinks to subjects, thus building up an inter-textual and transversal understanding of the presented work.

By tracing and mapping the individual path of a user throughout a textual protocol, the profiler not only displays the personal associations and understandings, a 'memex', but extends the interface to communication processes, mailing. Each user can add comments to the protocol and send/edit it as a personal profile to concerned persons.