Last week, I got a call from Building Design asking about some new kind of group that Fat were apparently part of. The journalist had been at an exhibition opening and had overheard a conversation between Will Alsop and a couple of the AOC. He’d been saying that he’d do his best to help people like them out, and he’d mentioned us and Branson Coates too. The guy from BD wanted to make a news story out of this. So I said a few things about Will and Nigel – about how they have done some great things in their time, agreeing with Will that it might possibly be harder for people who make work that looks like theirs or ours to become mainstream in the current architectural climate. But I defiantly also told them that I wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about. Its true that we know them all, and might go for drink now and again (and I’d bumped into some of the AOC at the Troy bar on the night of the exhibition in question), but that trying to group these people together – and especially to set us all up as though we are against anything else really wasn’t right. The next day, I got a call from a CABE press officer, asking wether I knew anything about a story that BD were going to run saying how I was slagging off CABEs design review panel.
On Thursday evening, the story comes out in BD that we have set up some kind of association.
On Saturday, this has become a news story in the Guardian with a special opinion from Jonathan Glancy. This piece seems to be saying how this new association wants to usurp Foster and Rogers.
Meanwhile, I’m still in the dark as to what the actual story is.
I guess it says quite a bit about how a (total non) story works: from overheard (probably well lubricated) conversation to broadsheet in just a few days.
On the other hand, it is the silly season, and it is about architecture. Even BD, the architects trade newspaper, is written by people who on the whole don’t actually know much about architecture.
]]>