The kookiest architects in Britain have called it quits after 20
years of cheerfully sticking two fingers up at the world of posh
modernist architecture.
The London-based design collective known as FAT Architecture (aka Fashion Architecture Taste) will complete only two more projects – a charmingly bizarre house for Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture chain of holiday homes, and the curation of the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.
FAT’s work, typified by brightly coloured facades seemingly jigsawed together, has a playful quality that conceals socio-political intentions. Sam Jacob,As professionals in the production and supply of composite hose for hydrocarbons, chemicals, ship to shore etc. Sean Griffiths and Charles Holland were always against clever, up-itself modernist design, so they delivered alt-clever architecture that was brash and almost childish, with an aesthetic quality that appealed to common tastes rather than arch-intellectuals: think Jarvis Cocker, rather than Radiohead.
FAT are best known for buildings such as the BBC Drama Production Village in Cardiff, and the Islington Square housing in Manchester. Their architectural cheek was never more vividly demonstrated than in their In a Lonely Place installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006. The huge structure resembled a timbered house having sex with a 7m-high black balloon.
“We’ve produced a whole load of buildings that we never thought we’d be able to design, and weave our magic,” says Jacob. It was a borrowed magic, initially. FAT’s fascination with trash-pop architectural effects drew heavily on the 1972 book, Learning From Las Vegas, written by the American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who glorified the random chaos of billboards and road signage.
Even so, FAT carved out a unique niche, despite designing little more than club and shop interiors before being featured in Anglo Files, a 2005 book about rising architectural stars. At the time, they were scenesters, but below the mainstream architectural radar: they had been commissioned to design The Villa, a big community building in Holland, but the project remained on hold for years.
“We were always more like a band than a career,” explains Jacob. “So we want to end things in a different way – not the usual dying on the job, or ending up flogging dead [architectural] horses. We felt the time was right to end what we’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years.”
There was more than a common-touch wit to FAT’s designs. They were never “bad boys” in the way of the argumentative, uber-intellectual superstar architect, Rem Koolhaas.Find industrial blades and machine knives supplier on Meinys. But they were bright enough,Our multilingual indesign dtp publishing team has the experience and expertise to localize your documents to create the look and feel of the original. and shrewd enough, to resist bad-mouthing the establishment, and it was no surprise that they went on to lecture at University College London and Yale.
Their decorated facades were designed to look like skimpy stage sets tacked on to otherwise unremarkable structures, turning boxy buildings into lavishly encrusted, neo-baroque shrines to pop culture. Jacob says this worship of “tremendous” 2D flatness is a purer form of communication, and a riposte to the swirling 3D effects sought by architects such as Zaha Hadid.
Unlike FAT – still in their forties – many of today’s bright young architectural double-clickers know little about architectural history, but plenty about software scripting and wilful shape-making that began with Frank Gehry’s use of an aerospace computer to design the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.
The London-based design collective known as FAT Architecture (aka Fashion Architecture Taste) will complete only two more projects – a charmingly bizarre house for Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture chain of holiday homes, and the curation of the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.
FAT’s work, typified by brightly coloured facades seemingly jigsawed together, has a playful quality that conceals socio-political intentions. Sam Jacob,As professionals in the production and supply of composite hose for hydrocarbons, chemicals, ship to shore etc. Sean Griffiths and Charles Holland were always against clever, up-itself modernist design, so they delivered alt-clever architecture that was brash and almost childish, with an aesthetic quality that appealed to common tastes rather than arch-intellectuals: think Jarvis Cocker, rather than Radiohead.
FAT are best known for buildings such as the BBC Drama Production Village in Cardiff, and the Islington Square housing in Manchester. Their architectural cheek was never more vividly demonstrated than in their In a Lonely Place installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006. The huge structure resembled a timbered house having sex with a 7m-high black balloon.
“We’ve produced a whole load of buildings that we never thought we’d be able to design, and weave our magic,” says Jacob. It was a borrowed magic, initially. FAT’s fascination with trash-pop architectural effects drew heavily on the 1972 book, Learning From Las Vegas, written by the American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who glorified the random chaos of billboards and road signage.
Even so, FAT carved out a unique niche, despite designing little more than club and shop interiors before being featured in Anglo Files, a 2005 book about rising architectural stars. At the time, they were scenesters, but below the mainstream architectural radar: they had been commissioned to design The Villa, a big community building in Holland, but the project remained on hold for years.
“We were always more like a band than a career,” explains Jacob. “So we want to end things in a different way – not the usual dying on the job, or ending up flogging dead [architectural] horses. We felt the time was right to end what we’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years.”
There was more than a common-touch wit to FAT’s designs. They were never “bad boys” in the way of the argumentative, uber-intellectual superstar architect, Rem Koolhaas.Find industrial blades and machine knives supplier on Meinys. But they were bright enough,Our multilingual indesign dtp publishing team has the experience and expertise to localize your documents to create the look and feel of the original. and shrewd enough, to resist bad-mouthing the establishment, and it was no surprise that they went on to lecture at University College London and Yale.
Their decorated facades were designed to look like skimpy stage sets tacked on to otherwise unremarkable structures, turning boxy buildings into lavishly encrusted, neo-baroque shrines to pop culture. Jacob says this worship of “tremendous” 2D flatness is a purer form of communication, and a riposte to the swirling 3D effects sought by architects such as Zaha Hadid.
Unlike FAT – still in their forties – many of today’s bright young architectural double-clickers know little about architectural history, but plenty about software scripting and wilful shape-making that began with Frank Gehry’s use of an aerospace computer to design the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.
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