Claire Jamieson, author of a new monograph on NATØ, examines the enduring significance of ‘the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century’
Emerging from Nigel Coates’ unit at the Architectural Association in 1983, NATØ (Catrina Beevor, Martin Benson, Nigel Coates, Peter Fleissig, Christina Norton, Robert Mull, Mark Prizeman, Melanie Sainsbury and Carlos Villanueva Brandt), continued the lineage of radicalism fostered by the school – and were arguably the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century. Coates had taken the unit over from Bernard Tschumi, pushing it in a new direction that eschewed Tschumi’s scholarly, literary approach to architecture in favour of a concentration on street life and street culture, sensation and narrative. Together, Coates and his students developed an approach that drew on fashion, television, music, video and nightclubs, using the strategy of bricolage to piece together a subcultural architecture located within the crumbling fabric of London’s Docklands.
NATØ sought to ‘destroy the notion of the profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest outside architecture’”
Encouraged by AA chair Alvin Boyarsky, Coates invited the students to form a group following the dramatic refusal by external examiners James Stirling and Edward Jones to assess the unorthodox work of his unit. Initially organised around the production of a magazine, NATØ went on to assemble several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a major installation at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.
Their approach was emphatically against the professional mainstream, and sought an audience in the fields of fashion and design, aligning themselves with magazines such as The Face and iD. Indeed, NATØ sought 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’. This street-savvy, creative individual could make or alter their surroundings in the same way they would modify or customise their clothing, self-publish their fanzine, record a punk demo, or weld furniture from found materials.
The group played down the architect’s role… by shifting emphasis and agency to the inhabitant”
NATØ was an early proponent of an approach that resisted the cult of the individual architect, and sought to expose the complex realities of living, working, and socialising in the city, making it a more vivid, stimulating experience. The group played down the architect’s role in this by shifting emphasis and agency to the inhabitant – encouraging creative use and misuse and challenging ideas of authorship. They celebrated ad hoc, improvised, reversible, and constantly adjusting spaces that bore the traces of their use, and were shaped and reorganised by inhabitation.
In this way NATØ represents a postmodern approach to architecture and the city that prioritised the pleasure and potential of the complex and chaotic, avoiding the simplification and reduction to decoration that pervaded much of postmodernist architecture. NATØ signifies the beginning of a counter-flow of architects and theorists who consider the city as a territory of overlapping experiences, relationships, histories and voices that should be exposed and researched – a condition to be embraced rather than smoothed. Rather than succumbing to the grand narratives of the masterplan and the Modernist desire to regulate, NATØ proposed a way of building the city that was gradual and piecemeal, an urbanism of small interventions that are incomplete and imperfect.
NATØ represents a postmodern approach to architecture and the city that prioritised the pleasure and potential of the complex and chaotic”
In the 1980s, NATØ provided a counter to the development that was rapidly reshaping east London – market-led visions of the future that excluded the vitality and disorder of the city proper. In this respect NATØ’s strategies have continued relevance today; indeed its legacy can be observed in the succession of architects, urbanists, spatial designers and theorists whose work has presented an alternative to the big-name architects and major public buildings of the 1990s and 2000s, who have reshaped the relationship between architect and user. Its story also points to the studio unit as fertile ground for productive exchange between students and experienced mentors – with the potential to disrupt dominant modes of practice and cultivate radicalism.
