Earlier this year, Routledge published my monograph on the last radical
architectural group of the 20th century – NATØ, Narrative
Architecture Today. My book, titled NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London, sets out a detailed, contextual history of the group, told through
photographs, drawings, and ephemera. NATØ never built together, so this is an
architectural history without buildings – and I argue that architectural
production is constituted as much by the drawings, texts, models and
exhibitions by architects as it is by built works.
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NATØ portrait by Sheila Rock, 1985. L to R: Peter Fleissig, Melanie Sainsbury, Catrina Beevor, Mark Prizeman,
Christina Norton, Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Martin Benson, Nigel Coates, Robert Mull |
NATØ emerged from the
Architectural Association, where they studied under Nigel Coates. Coates and
his students developed an approach to architecture that drew on fashion, television,
music, video and nightclubs – very much in opposition to the more serious and
inward-looking work happening elsewhere in the school. Indeed, they formed
following the dramatic failure of the cohort by AA external examiners James
Stirling and Ed Jones in 1983, who deemed their work little more than a ‘bunch
of cartoons’. Initially conceived around the production of a magazine, NATØ
went on to produce several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a
major installation at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art. Their approach
was emphatically against the professional mainstream of architecture, both in
discourse and in terms of practice. They sought an audience in the
fields of fashion and design more broadly, aligning themselves with magazines
such as The Face and iD. Indeed, NATØ aimed to ‘destroy the
notion of the profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest
outside architecture’ – envisioning a city made by its inhabitants, without the
top-down imposition of design by professionals. In their ‘apprentice’ character
NATØ described an individual who somewhat ambiguously both discredits and
becomes the professional: ‘From now on none of us, and yet all of us, will be
professionals’. They imagined a street-savvy, creative individual who can make
or alter their surroundings in the same way they would modify or customise
their clothing, self-publish or record their fanzine or punk demo, and weld
furniture from found materials.
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| Invitation to the first NATØ meeting, from Nigel Coates to Mark Prizeman (1983) |
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| NATØ issues 1-3, magazine covers (1983-85) |
Tracing the formation of the
group at the AA, my book examines the evolution of Coates's unit, including his
formative years alongside Bernard Tschumi between 1974-80, before investigating
NATØ's short period of activity between 1983-87 across the media of drawing,
publishing and exhibiting. I had access to a fascinating body of archival
material from the period, held primarily in the private collections of the NATØ
members, which is published for the first time in my book. The book is
structured around these three core outputs – examining first the drawings, then
the magazines and finally the installations. Through the analysis of these
archival materials, the book explores NATØ’s preoccupation with narrative,
drawing terms and definitions from narratology into architectural discourse for
the first time to develop a new vocabulary of architectural narrativity.
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| NATØ, Gamma City exhibition at the Air Gallery (1985) |
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| Objects from NATØ's Gamma City, left: 'Soft Chandeliers' by Catrina Beevor; right: 'Totem' by Carlos Villanueva Brandt (1985) |
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Catrina Beevor, ‘Terminal Culture (an english
landscape)’ from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987) |
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Carlos Villanueva Brandt, 'Heathrow' from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987) |
Part of the importance in
telling the story of NATØ is the restoration of a more complete account of
postmodernism, with the book reinstating one of the many contours of the
inherently multifaceted field. The book contributes to the growing body of
literature that is recuperating postmodernism from the often-reductive discourses
that pervade writing on architecture. My contemporary re-reading of postmodernism through NATØ's work avoids the
simplifying definitions of architectural postmodernism that have focused on the
stylised, two-dimensional modes of pastiche historicism. Instead, NATØ’s
provides a case study of architectural postmodernism that prioritised the
pleasure and creative potential of the complex and chaotic, avoiding reduction
to surface decoration in favour of rich, narrativised experience.
Finally, the book also describes a specific urban milieu: 1980s London.
Contextualising NATØ’s work from a spatial, social, political and cultural
perspective, I align the group with the street subcultures of the period,
discovering parallels between their approach and the work of contemporaneous
filmmakers, graphic designers, product designers and fashion designers working
in London. Indeed, the specific state of post-industrialising London and its
urban decay forms an integral part of understanding the work of both NATØ and
their contemporaries – an idea I expand upon in the book.
I will be building on some of the ideas developed in the book in my
paper ‘DIY and disorder: NATØ’s approach
to making and materiality’ for the Design History Society Conference at the University of Oslo in September 2017. In
March 2018, my TVAD Talk will explore the work of product designers including
Ron Arad, Tom Dixon’s Creative Salvage group and Daniel Weil whose work echoes
many of NATØ’s preoccupations.
Dr. Claire Jamieson is lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies for BA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture and Design at University of Hertfordshire.
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