Architecture Centre Talk - FAT

The Changing Face of British Architecture Series - 21 November

Sean Griffiths – co founder of FAT [fashion:architecture:taste]

My father once told me that there is no such thing as ‘new’ in fashion, it always repeats, recycles and re-uses itself. There are only so many base elements and these are copied and manipulated in different ways to achieve varying results. This idea of copying was the most interesting and captivating part of the Sean Griffiths talk last night at the Arnolfini. Griffiths, co-founder of FAT, was the first talk in the Architecture Centre series on the Changing Face of British Architecture.

Sean Griffiths Source: Architecture Centre
© Portrait by Timothy Soar

The concept of copies and copying is generally regarded in opposition to originality; however FAT aims to create originality from this copying. By re-referencing themselves and history they seek to create a sense of new. This reflects what happens in nature, where reproduction occurs in fractal elements; the patterns of minerals, leaves and even blood vessels show significant copying. The repetition of a shape at the same proportion but different scales gives each natural item its own identity.  A self-referencing pattern governed by its own need for reproducing. This replicating and repeating is what gives the fractals and architecture a complexity. Griffiths pointed out that copying used to be a sign of good (architectural) work; classical architects were praised for clear references to other architecture and architects. The more they mimicked the higher the praise for their ‘new’ design. Whilst Baroque architecture used the idea of replicating to create a logical complexity, the same shape would be repeated, mirrored, scaled and rotated to develop a depth to the design and space.



Repetition in Russian Dolls
Image Source

FAT use the notion of copying and reproduction in their Living Architecture proposal ‘A House for Essex’. In collaboration with the artist Grayson Perry they have conceived a Russian Doll style house that is formed form a series of spaces and elements that repeat themselves. These elements have the same proportions and shapes, but are re-sized to create the complexity of the house.

A series of simple, house forms step up in scale from the entrance to the main living room space. Each of these spaces is expressed externally as a volume in its own right. The building gets higher as it steps down the hill with the tallest volume at the lowest point.

(Living Architecture - House for Essex)

House for Essex
Source: Living Architecture © FAT

The simple concept makes the house more interesting in plan and elevation view, even if the materials, ornamentation and decorations have caused some controversy. (The house was originally blocked at planning and was only approved the second time around. The images of the building have had people likening it to a gingerbread house or a dolls house, though it has also been called fun and an endearing mish-mash.)

The idea of copies and copying is very interesting and certainly persistent to all architects; a project never makes it far before precedents are produced. Whether for the client, planning or public consultation, Architects will be required to show other buildings that are similar, the same or identical to justify their design decisions.  Precedents are a form of copying. The degree of the copy depends on the project, whether to create an architectural doppelganger* by exactly imitating an existing architecture or by taking an architectural part and re-referencing its use and impact.

At this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale FAT produced the ‘Museum of Copying’ which addressed how there is nothing original in architecture and that everyone copies everyone else. As part of FAT’s copying research they established that the Villa Rotunda (by Palladio) was one of the most copied pieces of architecture; following from the repetition of others FAT produced a copying machine to re-produce a segment of the Villa.

Museum of Copying
Source: FashionArchitectureTaste © FAT

The Villa Rotunda Redux, a 5m high re-make of Palladio's Villa Rotunda that explores the Villa as both a subject and object of architectural copying. The facsimile is made using contemporary fabrication techniques, CNCing a giant mould from which a spray-foam cast is taken. Cast and mould are arranged as two quarters of the Villa displaying the process of fabrication as well as opposing qualities of positive and negative, and interior and exterior. (Villa Rotunda Redux - FAT)

Museum of Copying - mould and copy
Source: FashionArchitectureTaste © FAT

The interior and exterior of the space are created from the mould and cast of the original villas exterior, by using the mould FAT managed to create the exterior from an interior, using the copy to produce an original, which changed the perception of the space. The beauty of the project was its simplicity and the way it causes you to read the building differently depending on whether you are looking at the fragmented mould (copying machine) or the copy. The viewers would occupy the space between the two and see a different version of the same repeated villa. The copy’s had created the projects originality.

Museum of Copying -
Showing Mould & Cast Interiors & Exteriors
Source: FashionArchitectureTaste © FAT

One does not have to personally like the aesthetic style of FAT’s decorative and façade heavy architecture to appreciate the idea of reproduction and copying to create the new. Maybe my Dad was right after all, that there really is no such thing as ‘new’ in fashion [architecture:taste], it always repeats, recycles and re-uses itself. Maybe the way forward for architecture is to look behind us.

*a copy of Sean Griffiths terminology used at the talk