After 23 years of practice, on December 16 2014, the influential and iconoclastic London-based office of FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste) has announced its decision to disband in 2014.
Two typically ‘FAT’ projects next year — the British Pavilion for the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture, and A House for Essex, in collaboration with Grayson Perry — perfectly blend their unapologetically intelligent fusion of popular culture and witty design, and will see the practice out with a bang. As much as the built work of the office, the individual practices of their founder members Charles Holland, Sean Griffiths and Sam Jacob have brought architectural discourse closer to the real grain of life — one that is not dogmatic, but happily tainted with humour and ‘low’ culture, borrowing across and straying from disciplinary boundaries. Whether writing about DVD box sets, political turmoil or conducting midnight marathons, the collective output of FAT will be missed from London’s architectural scene — yet their impact has already been absorbed by an emerging generation, and no doubt unexpected and incisive future projects from dispersed members of the practice.
In Blueprint’s 30th anniversary issue (Sept/Oct 2013) we revisited the first time FAT appeared on our cover — as (very) young turks in 1997. Below are founding partner Sam Jacobs reflections on then and now.
The cover of Blueprint from April 1997
In 1997, FAT was in a process of metamorphosis, in its chrysalis stage. Changing from its larval form of a loose collective, sloughing off its adolescence before emerging as an architecturally active butterfly. We had probably just completed the KesselsKramer interior design in Amsterdam, and were pushing get into building real buildings. It was took a real force of effort to do this, something that often felt like a Sisyphean task, to take a set of interests and concerns and transform them into built reality. We were connected at that time with like-minded young Dutch practices, like NL Architects, and Crimson Architectural Historians – with whom we’re designing the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture next year.
From left: Sam Jacob, Charles Holland and Sean Griffiths
Over the last thirty years, it is perhaps noticeable how little has changed, how many established practices are ploughing the same furrow. Look at Zaha’s office, for example, or Ben van Berkel’s Canaletto building on City Road – these guys have been doing the same thing since the early nineties, and no one seems to worry about moving on. If you compare it to how culture used to revolve with such astounding speed – for example it’s just a decade between Sergeant Pepper and the Six Pistols, then another to Acid House – contemporary culture seems very a different proposition. Maybe that’s something to do with the time we live in; everything exists simultaneously and is equally connected. Maybe culture doesn’t progress in the straight forward way it used to. That might explain how come we’re in the 3rd decade of the 80’s revival.
