Fashion Architecture Taste
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Fashion Architecture Taste or FAT is an art and architecture collaborative first established in the 1990s in London, England. Their work falls broadly under the postmodern category with pop-culture influences.
The group has been described as "very young" and "very controversial" and have a cult following. Over recent years they have developed a large body of critically acclaimed built work in the UK and abroad.
History
The group formed in London in the 1990s, and challenged the "orthodoxy of Modernist good taste", first with experimentalism in their Anti-Oedipal House (1993) that separated children and parents, and then at the 1995 Venice Biennale by distributing art from vending machines. They did a similar effort later in London's Carnaby Street on shopping bags (1999), and in 1998, converted an Amsterdam church into the Kessels Kramer Advertising Office in with big playground furniture, a fort, fake diving board, and lifeguard shack.
Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob are the main members of the group. Emma Somerset Davis has been a previous member and a director of the group and lead artist collaborating on FAT's art exhibitions and projects over ten years.
The group operated on a limited budget with their early projects and acted as an anti-hierarchical collective. They were influenced by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Stanley Tigerman, Situationists, Mannerism, the Arts and Crafts movement, Archigram, and Jeff Koons. They "steal copy, collage and make overt references to all kinds of high and low architecture; reusing, rescaling, recolouring; remaking their sources in the wrong materials," with their first projects being redesigns of interiors such as the Brunel Rooms nightclub in Swindon (1995), where a running track, swimming pool, garden shed and lounge were added. One of Fat's directors, Sean Griffiths, built a house in baby blue with cutout wall shapes and artful references to Edwin Lutyens, Adolf Loos, and Robert Venturi.
The group has been described as "very young" and "very controversial", having "brought work in the ultra-cool Netherlands," success on the international lecture and exhibition circuit. Members of the group describe FAT's work as figurative, eclectic and "not constrained by notions of taste." They view mainstream architecture as abstract, and say their work is direct and traditional like the "Natural History Museum... It’s got little animals all over it." The group started out with a "small powerful, furiously debated body of built work, some of it up before the protagonists hit thirty".
