FAT digital image The Tanner Point highrise in Newham, East London, brackets in the 15-story building with additions that hold bathrooms. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Video: Gritty Brits -- New London Architecture The Exhibit "Gritty Brits: New London Architecture," continues at Carnegie Museum of Art through June 3. The museum is located at 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Lunch & Learn At 10:30 a.m. Feb. 15, Raymund Ryan, curator of "Gritty Brits: New London Architecture," will talk about the history and emerging themes of London's architecture and urban development. After lunch, participants will join Ryan for a gallery tour of models, drawings and photographs that reveal how the work responds to social trends and diverse and often overlooked communities in London today. The program, which concludes at 2 p.m., is part of Carnegie Museum of Art's Lunch & Learn program. Fee: $44, or $35 for Carnegie Museums members. Call 412-622-3288 to register.

This is public housing?

This tower with the fanciful parapets and the colorful, perforated balconies ripped from a sultan's palace?

Not yet, but it will be. The scheme, which won a 2003 competition, looks like child's play in Legoland but in fact is the work of a firm called FAT. Clearly, FAT makes architecture fun.

It's one of six rising young firms featured in "Gritty Brits: New London Architecture," at Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center.

Joining FAT in the show is muf. FAT is an acronym for "Fashion Architecture Taste" and muf is an all-woman firm whose name stands for -- just what does it stand for? Sometimes they joke it stands for something like "metropolitan urban females" but actually, it's not an acronym.

"In England muf is a naughty word, if you add another f," said Heinz curator Raymund Ryan, who organized the exhibit.

Aha. Just like here.

So how seriously should we take FAT and muf, whose names manage to sound both like characters in a children's book and cast members in a Comedy Central show? Turns out the firms with the provocative names are doing serious work; they just make it look lighthearted by injecting their artful projects with what their names seem to promise: high doses of wit and whimsy.

What's so gritty, then, about these witty Brits?

Mostly it's the context: The six firms are showing work done primarily in London's East End, an area that is urban, post-industrial and multicultural.

The work itself can be rigorous, elegant or playful, but always respects its surroundings, knowing that its place in an ancient, multilayered city is to make a little noise but basically fit in.

One of Ryan's charges when he was hired almost three years ago was to organize international exhibits, and with "Gritty Brits" he's fulfilled the promise of bringing news of the outside world to the provinces. Ryan, an Irishman, chose London because it's a city he knows well, and he has delivered compelling, caring work that reaches across genres, styles and class lines.

What the projects have in common, Ryan says, is the architects' empirical approach, basing their designs on the conditions, history and culture of the site. They also share an affinity for the art and architecture of the 1960s, the decade in or near which most of these firms' founders were born.

There are unadorned, origami-like buildings such as Caruso St. John Architects' Brick House, which takes its asymmetrical shape from its tight site, but also highly ornamented ones, such as the same firm's Centre for Contemporary Arts in Nottingham, whose patterned decoration was inspired by the city's historic lace industry.

More than half of the exhibit is devoted to residential work, including public housing, a type sorely in need of reinvention.

FAT's tower is a re-do of a typically bland 1960s housing tower in Newham, East London. The new Tanner Point high-rise design brackets the 15-story building with additions that hold bathrooms, creating more living space for multi-generational families, some of whom will have two-story apartments. Many of the residents are immigrants from Eastern cultures, which inspired the design of the balcony additions.

	muf digital image For a housing estate in Tilbury, Essex, muf designed an arena where local girls can ride wandering ponies. Click photo for larger image.

Muf's contribution to the public housing arena is just that -- an arena. One of the women of muf, which was asked to design a community garden for a tough housing estate in Tilbury, Essex, noticed horse dung in the playground and discovered that local girls liked to ride the wandering ponies whose ancestors pulled the caravans of Romany travelers. The new arena at the base of three residential towers celebrates the girls' relationship with the ponies and provides a common ground for interacting with the estate's neighbors, who also use it. Muf, a collaborative of about a dozen artists and architects who work only on public projects, also created a playground and an area for pickup football games.

In Pittsburgh, muf is working on a project with the Children's Museum called the Charm Bracelet, meant to find creative ways to link North Side attractions. As it progresses, updates will appear in "Gritty Brits."

For people who can afford to purchase 30 percent of their units (and pay rent on the remaining 70 percent), Niall McLaughlin Architects has designed 12 loft-like apartments in Silvertown, once known for factories that produced iridescent dyes. Working with light artist Martin Richman, McLaughlin used iridescent film under striated glass panels to create a luminous facade that changes colors depending on the sun, the sky and the viewer's position. The effect is magical on the exterior; inside the panels admit no light, which comes in through corner windows.

McLaughlin also shows an unbuilt prototype for an off-the-grid houseboat on one of England's industrial canals, which are being reborn as places along which to live, walk and bike. With its glass walls, deck full of solar collectors and pulley-run ceiling storage system, it looks like the ultimate machine for energy-efficient living. Canals are connecting threads for several projects in the exhibit, including a David Adjaye house clad in aluminum panels in keeping with the industrial buildings of the Grand Union Canal in Ladbroke Grove.

One more firm: Sergison Bates architects, represented by five residential projects, some public, some not, and some distinguished by their unusual and sometimes rhythmic fenestration.

"Gritty Brits" is presented with dramatic flair in the mural-sized photographs of London, in 18 architectural models (six built for the show) and in the darkened room devoted to Adjaye, with a video whose haunting score leaks into the other galleries. It's a substantive survey with a thesis brought home in the galleries and in catalog essays by British author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair and by Ryan, who may have coined a name that sticks for a generation of architects intent on shaping London's future without obliterating its past.