Good to see you in Berlin. You worked here for a bit once didn’t you?
Yes, a long time ago in 1993. It was a recession in the UK, not as bad as this one, but worse for architects I think. There was basically no work at all. So I came to Berlin and worked for an architect called Stefan Sterf. We did a lot of competitions and I was an expert in colouring in presentation drawings!
Initially I lived on Frankfurter Allee. It was the worst flat I’ve ever lived in: the houses next door collapsed just after I’d left. I then moved to Prenzlauerberg, which was beautifully shabby back then.
That 90s recession also gave rise to your own office, FAT. Can you describe the background to the practice – and the origins of the name?
FAT is an accidental architectural practice. It started with some loosely affiliated people from different disciplines carrying out projects in various constellations, not necessarily doing architecture. The recession forced a sort of do-it-yourself ethos: what projects can we do if we’re not going to work in architecture offices, if no one’s going to hire us? Let's make some exhibitions of our own work in cheap spaces – stuff like that.
FAT means Fashion Architecture Taste. The idea was to link architecture to fashion and taste, two things which are still quite controversial for it to be associated with, and deliberately provocative of the idea that architecture is about timelessness and authenticity, you know, the love of stone under the Italian sun. That it’s now actually part of a much faster-moving cultural world.
An interest in postmodernism seems key to the practice: both as it relates to your work, which has often been seen as a critique or a reinvestigation of some of its ideas, but also in your theoretical engagement with it.
Originally we were interested in looking back to it – given this idea of fashion in architecture – as being the most toxic, unfashionable thing in recent architectural history that you could be interested in. You know: whatever you do, don’t press the button marked postmodernism!
But that led to a more genuine interest in some of the things that were going on in postmodernism. In the 90s, Venturi & Scott Brown were being written off as crassly commercial, yet their work was actually far more critical than their critics would allow. It engaged with popular culture, which opened up a whole load of possibilities to us including an interest in taste and popular culture, the American suburb, signs and symbols in the home.
Charles Holland is an architect, and director, with Sean Griffiths and Sam Jacob, of FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), based in London. He has taught and lectured widely, both in the UK and abroad and is currently a Visiting Professor at Yale University and a design tutor at the Canterbury School of Architecture. He writes about architecture and design for a number of magazines and edits Fantastic Journal, a blog about Architecture, Design and Other Things Too.
FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) was originally founded in the 1990s as a cross-disciplinary practice, working on architecture and art projects. Recent built work includes Islington Square Housing (2006), Thornton Heath Library (2010) and CIAC Apartment Block in Middlesborough (2012). Currently on-site is the project “A House for Essex”, in which FAT is working with artist Grayson Perry, commissioned by Living Architecture. Past exhibition and installation work has include “Interior with Landscape No.1” at the ICA (1999), “In A Lonely Place” at RIBA (2006) and “The Museum of Copying” at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale (2012).
And FAT recently co-authored a book with Charles Jencks called Radical Postmodernism.
Yes. Architectural Design (AD) had asked Charles Jencks to do a special on postmodernism, because of course he wrote all those AD’s in the 70s, which had effectively defined it. He invited us to do it with him and we came up with the title, because no one associates postmodernism with being radical – yet we think there was radical content in it. Charles liked the title because the word “radical” reminded him of the 60s. For him, postmodernism was about the counter-culture of the 1960s: the whole series of reactions to early 20th century modernism.
In some ways doing this book felt like the end of a process. After finishing the book, we were like: I never want to look at any postmodernism ever again!
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