Of the three or four kinds of architecture that are officially sanctioned these days, all are broadly modernist. They vary from the ubiquitous Polite Modern (the latest incarnation of the original White Modern of the interwar years, sometimes seen through a high-tech filter) to the licensed craziness of the visitor-attracting icon buildings, with their blobs and swirls and zigzags. A small side serving of traditionalism is tolerated, though not actively encouraged. But the one thing nobody in architecture’s ruling class dares contemplate, remembering the horrors of the 1980s, is the idea of a new generation of postmodernism. This is FAT’s territory. The initials stand for Fashion, Architecture and Taste.
If you buy a stamp in Holland today, you may well find a FAT building on it. The Dutch like FAT, mostly because they perceive them to be artists as much as architects. The building in question is unknown in Britain: a “bicycle surveillance shelter”. These are guard huts for bike parks. In the Hague, a public art agency had the good idea of getting artists, architects and designers to reinvent these utilitarian structures. FAT obliged with the smallest monumental building imaginable. In the seaside suburb of Scheveningen, it is a small pyramid on one side and a battlemented castle on the other. At its peak, like a mad chimney or lantern, is a model of a gabled Dutch house. At random intervals, this house hisses, flashes and smokes, as if catching fire.
None of the three main members of FAT, Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, has a clear-cut explanation as to why the hut is like this, though, of course, they have a name for it: a “non-ument”. It had to be distinctive, they say; it had to stand up to big, somewhat surreal neighbouring attractions such as giant plastic gorillas and neon parrots. “It tries to respond to that seaside architecture without replicating it,” says Jacob. The first idea was to make it a hill, since the Netherlands has few of those. Then they thought about other man-made hills, such as the pyramidal war memorial at the site of the battle of Waterloo. Not far away, in the Hague, is a miniature model of the whole of Holland, a country-scale model village. The house on top refers to that. It also turned out, by coincidence, that the war-crimes court trying Slobodan Milosevic was nearby. That, in a way, justified the memorial aspect. So, various strands, serious and populist, came together. It was built for something like £30,000. FAT forgot about it, then suddenly found it had become enough of a national favourite to feature on a 69c Dutch stamp.
The three are gathered in their cluttered top-floor studio near London’s Barbican. Their address describes this as Appletree Cottage, and one wall is clad in rough clinker planks, providing that homely touch. In the past, FAT played up such flipness and played down their obvious but more mainstream talents; today, the message is different. They want to tell me they are serious architects doing serious work. Their first significant UK building, Woodward Place, a terrace of affordable rented housing in Manchester’s New Islington urban village, is almost finished, complete with the Dutch-gables-on-steroids treatment that has the functionalists choking on their herb tea. Of course, the prospective tenants love it, and once FAT start getting out the photos of their clients’ existing living rooms, with crazy self-built fireplaces, half-timbering and nick-nacks, it becomes plain the admiration is mutual. Rejecting the usual architectural solutions of tidiness and uniformity, they believe people should be encouraged to customise their homes.
This approach is taken to extremes with their competition-winning project to redesign the Brookes Estate tower block in London to house a mix of different-sized households. Revisiting and subverting the old modernist idea of “streets in the sky”, the block becomes a matrix from which homes of various styles and sizes sprout, quite literally.
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Tenants will be able to choose from a selection of designs. It’s not just a surface image: FAT have worked out a way of re-engineering the block to make this possible. Also, as usual, the design gloriously confronts the whole issue of taste — what’s good, what’s bad, what’s yours, what’s mine? There are another couple of Dutch projects: a community park in a new town, involving everything from a village hall for hobbyists to a pet cemetery; the almost finished £3.5m makeover of the St Lucas art school, which involves clever space planning behind a new facade of pseudo-gothic tracery in moulded concrete. Over here, FAT are starting to design a confidential new eco-village in the English countryside. The point is made: FAT, born in the recession of the early 1990s, when there was no work to be had but plenty of fun, have stopped arsing about and are getting the work in.
And how do they describe their style? This has them scrabbling around for competitive definitions. “Eclectic — architecture as a cultural act,” says Jacob. “Figurative,” offers Griffiths, noting that just about all other architecture is abstract. Holland produces: “Not constrained by notions of taste.” Nobody once mentions postmodernism, I realise later. The bottom line is, this is architecture that tells stories. “Our meaning is very direct,” concludes Griffiths. “We’re quite traditional, in a way. Look at the Natural History Museum. It ’s got little animals all over it.”
www.fat.co.uk
The ‘how to become a famous architect’ section is all true