This week brought 23-years of FAT Architecture to an end, as the practice's three principals announced its closure in 2014. A British studio founded in the early 1990s by Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, FAT emerged as one of the most intellectual British practices of the past 20 years. Its fanciful, postmodern work was not restricted to buildings, and it also engaged in teaching, writing, art and design; all part of its desire to broaden the debate around contemporary architecture. Here, Jacob talks to Disegno about his and his partners' decision to close the studio.

You said in the announcement that FAT is closing because you feel that you’ve “completed the mission”. Why do you feel like that?

FAT was never a conventional architecture office and certainly when we began it was not as an architecture office, but as a loose collective – which was the colloquial term popular in the early 1990s. It was really much more about creative responses to architecture and to the city, not about producing buildings. It is a project that didn’t use traditional architectural means like walls and roofs and things like that. It was very much an idea about architecture, which was that we felt architecture was a much wider subject than professional architecture normally considers. We wanted to explore that, but in a real way rather than a theoretical or academic way. That led us on to a way of thinking about architecture, which was that it is very closely related to ideas about communication and that it is part of a much wider culture than canonical architecture.

In that sense when we started, and it’s difficult to say at what point we did start, the ambition was not a career or even to have an office; it was to explore a set of ideas relating to architecture. We feel that we’ve kind of achieved that and taken it a long way and certainly much further than we ever thought would be possible. We’ve built a whole series of buildings, which we’re very proud of, and we’ve got one more to come, which we’re very excited about. Those have taken the project to a conclusion. What we didn’t want the office to become was an office; a firm that needed feeding with projects just to keep going. What we wanted to do was to end it as a project, rather than it turn into a traditional office.

Is that a financial consideration? When you have something called FAT you need a company and an office. Are you keen to avoid all that?

No, I don’t think it’s anything to do with that. It’s much more to do with an idea of what FAT is and what FAT was. We wanted to be true to the nature of FAT.

A few weeks ago the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester resigned from her own label. She started at a similar time to you and I guess she had similar hopes for fashion as you did with architecture in terms of what it could be. Is there a certain disillusionment within your generation about the way these professions are going? Is the world you operate in as open to ideas as when you started out?

It’s strange actually. In some ways it’s much more open in architecture. When we started even the idea of being a young British architect working in Britain seemed like a total pipe dream. It wasn’t something that happened and I think the culture in Britain has now changed incredibly. You can see the evidence of that in young practices and the many more ways in which they can now get commissioned and find work and get support from local authorities, competitions and institutions. The landscape has changed for the better dramatically in that sense. We like to say that we, along with others, helped with that to some extent.

But at the same time architecture seen through the lens of the construction industry has also changed. The role of the architect is increasingly different from the traditional conception. The ways in which buildings are procured and built has changed – a lot more design and build, a lot more risk-averseness from developers and their investors. In general what seems to be happening is a polarisation of practices between the very, very big and the very, very small. That makes the landscape more difficult to navigate. We feel very fortunate that we’ve been able to engage with mainstream clients and mainstream projects. It’s incredible that we’ve had clients support us and believe in us. A project like the BBC studio in Cardiff was an amazing moment of patronage for us. But those projects are few and far between as well and that’s partly to do with the nature of development in the UK, which I think has changed dramatically from the real attempts at regeneration that were happening in the early 2000s.

As FAT you all already worked a lot independently on projects connected to writing and curation. What will be the actual difference to you moving forward? Will there be a big difference?

I think so. We’ve all been working together for so long that we’ve all basically grown up together. We’ve always maintained external interests and profiles and I think those have developed in different ways. That’s not to say that we don’t agree with each other, but the areas of interest and the ways of working are such that we all have different ideas about what those might be. It’s whatever the word for bifurcation in relation to three things is!

You have the Grayson Perry house coming up and the British Pavilion that you’re part of the curatorial team for at the Venice Biennale in 2014. Why does it make sense to make this announcement now?

We thought it was a good time to do it. We’ve got two really amazing projects and opportunities, which we’re really excited about. We want these to be seen as a certain culmination of types of interest that we’ve had at FAT. We thought announcing it now would allow those projects to stand as the finale to FAT and let us go out on a high. I think that’s quite an unusual thing for an architecture office to do.

Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian hinted at there being some unfulfilled potential within FAT in terms of the original ideas and what you’ve achieved to date, and you’ve already talked about not being adverse to a reunion. What’s the probability of that happening?

I think it’s very likely that we’ll stay in touch and very likely we’ll be doing some things together now and again. I don’t know what those will be, but it’s something we’ve been talking about.

In terms of going out on a high, is there anything as FAT that you’d want to be particularly remembered for? A building? A way of thinking?

I suppose there are a number of different legacies we’d like to leave. One is a demonstration that it is possible, even in Britain, even in the 21st Century, to take a conceptual idea about architecture into the world and build it in very real places as very real projects. Not only with art galleries and opera houses, which are the glamour projects, but we’ve done that with projects that are about places, communities and possibilities of cities. We’re very proud of that. A very strong social commitment is something we think we’ve fulfilled.

The other thing is that we’ve helped open up other possibilities of what architecture might be; what it might look like or be interested in. If you look at the landscape behind us, there are influences we’ve created. If we’ve managed to contribute to the potential and culture of architecture, that’s amazing.

INTERVIEW Johanna Agerman Ross, the editor-in-chief of Disegno magazine

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