Introduction

In February 1984, a little under a year after the formation of architectural group Narrative Architecture Today (NATØ), Mark Prizeman issued a memo outlining the aims and themes of the second issue of NATØ magazine. The note proposed the ways in which NATØ would ‘stab at the heart’ of the RIBA Festival of Architecture – the year-long event celebrating 150 years of the Institute – urging his fellow members to ‘Excite and offend’ and ‘smell the lust of something new’. Prizeman’s diatribe began with a call to arms: ‘Here we stand... remember we are to be brazen, this is propaganda’, expressed in a strident ‘us’ and ‘them’ tone – NATØ versus Architecture. Performing the rhetorical language of the avant-garde, Prizeman announced NATØ’s plan to ‘destroy the notion of profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest outside architecture’.