A house is an artwork that you can live in.
I've always thought we were like fat angels that could not fly.
Jaume Plensa, TEDx Talk at SMU, Dallas, TX, 2011
FAT look beyond technological minimalism. They are interested in beauty, which makes them extremely strange. It shouldn't, but such is the spurious orthodoxy around 'function' that what should be common sense has come to seem peculiar and whimsical.
Alain de Botton, "On FAT," c. 2013
They were too clever by half. They made a tactical manoeuvre of going explicitly against the tide, which certainly works in the art world, but not so much with buildings. They were always given the B-movie commissions, which is a great shame.... They've stirred up a little bit of trouble, but don't think they had a great effect on the British scene. It's because the British don't like explicit taste, fashion and style in architecture any more. In all the other arts they go crazy for it. If FAT had been around with Lord Burlington, everyone would have listened to them.
Charles Jencks, "On FAT," c. 2010
Keep up the bad work.
Robert Venturi, "Advice to FAT," c. 2005
FAT, Islington Square Houses, Manchester, England, 2006
'For the northern part of seaside the boulevard of Scheveningen, opposite of the Carlton Beach Hotel, the London-based collective FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) has designed a guard house, a surveillance hut for a bicycle park, which is hidden inside a white mound. The small building is part of a rampart with battlements. The hut is contained in an object that is part monument, part strange fortification and part folly, deriving from seaside architecture, fortifications, lighthouses and earthworks. On top of the mound there is a miniature model of a typically Dutch house. The ‘House on the Hill' that “periodically catches fire” i.e. frequently produces 'special effects' like bolts of lightning or puffs of smoke, inspired by the nearby lighthouse. In 2005 the FAT guard house received the FX Award 'Best Public Project' . In 2006 it was included in a new series of stamps dedicated to contemporary art, issued by TPG Post.'