SUMMARY

In this interview, Sam Jacob reflected on FAT’s design approach in the 1990s, emphasizing how the studio’s use of iconic forms and kitsch surface treatments responded to the rise of the internet and the broader media environment. Influenced by media theory and Marshall McLuhan, as well as French Theory through Kevin Rhowbotham, including Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and Baudrillard, Jacob described an underlying ontology in which all experience was mediated by representations. This framework guided FAT’s work.

During the 1990s, many designers claimed that their approach expressed the new media-technical conditions of the age, whether through smooth, fluid forms or minimal high-tech structures. Jacob emphasized that FAT’s pop semiotic and kitsch aesthetic should also be seen as part of this discourse. The studio’s work can be understood as giving new life to a postmodern cultural logic, tracing back through Venturi, Koolhaas, the Independent Group, and the Smithsons, based on a flattened and eclectic landscape of popular architectural imagery.

Jacob illustrated this with the Brunel nightclub in Swindon, an early FAT project conceived as a tribute to OMA’s Park La Villette entry. The design featured strips representing different cultural spaces, including a running track, a swimming pool, and airport security, using printed carpet and furniture surfaces. This project demonstrated FAT’s engagement with cultural fragmentation, artifice, and juxtaposition, explicitly informed by post-structuralist theory and ontological reflection, extending the postmodern tradition into a more conceptually rigorous framework.