SUMMARY

Sean Griffiths reflected on how shifts in architectural discourse shaped his trajectory. As an undergraduate at Manchester Polytechnic in the mid-1980s, he was introduced to phenomenological concepts such as place, truth, and authenticity by Joe Jessop. When he later sought to apply phenomenology to Frank Gehry’s work at Westminster, his advisor Robin Evans directed him toward Theodor Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, prompting a critique of Heideggerian thought and a conviction that authenticity in architecture was impossible under capitalism.

This critical turn came during a transitional moment: phenomenology and postmodernism were giving way to deconstructivism, Deleuzean theory, and rising neomodernism. While Griffiths largely missed the peak of deconstruction, he encountered Deleuzean ideas early through Kevin Rhowbotham, who introduced mapping and curvilinear experimentation around 1989–90. In 1991, Griffiths co-founded a practice with Rhowbotham, which evolved into FAT with Sam Jacob and Charles Holland in 1996.

In the mid-1990s, FAT took the then-outmoded postmodernism of Venturi and Scott Brown and repurposed it as a provocative, critical gesture against the neo-modernist establishment, transforming POMO into a tool of class critique. Whereas Griffiths’s earlier intellectual shift from phenomenology to critical theory had aligned with the dominant currents of the time, this embrace of neo-postmodernism ran counter to the neoliberal climate of the 1990s, yet gained renewed relevance after the 2008 financial crisis