Owen Hatherley

Why should we have to Keep Calm and Carry On ? In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a make do and mend aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. " The Ministry of Nostalgia" explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose with subjects ranging from Ken Loach s documentaries, Turner Prize shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver s cooking Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on."

The Ministry of Nostalgia

In a darkly humorous book, the author argues that neoliberalism has left much of Britain's architecture in shambles and asserts that the derelict British architecture of the 2010s is an emphatic expression of failed politics. By the author of Militant Modernism.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

...subtle ingenuity and sheer exuberance Jonathan Meades, New Statesman ...freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. Will Self, London Review of Books This book is a defence of Modernism against its defenders. In readings of modern design, film, pop and especially architecture, it attempts to reclaim a revolutionary modernism against its absorption into the heritage industry and the aesthetics of the luxury flat. Militant Modernism features new readings of some familiar names - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier - but more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen - all arguing for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. Simon Reynolds, Author of Rip It Up and Start Again - Postpunk 1978-84 Brecht meeting Ballard to create the science-fiction of socialism. Benjamin Noys, Author of The Culture of Death

Militant Modernism

Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, super modernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnectedby high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, from Dniepropetrovsk to Madrid, Edirne to Reykjavik, and to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. He also discovers another EU, where rail systems can't function, nationalism is on the rise, retail parks and tourists engulf cities and the deregulated public sphere rivals anything in Brexit Britain. And that's just the part of the continent allowed in the club, which resembles nothing so much as a rebranding of something much older: Christendom. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it: the difference between Chisinau and Stockholm is so vast that it makes little sense to call them both European capitals. Trans-Europe Express is a striking picture of a continent that has managed to create urban environments more pleasant, comfortable and attractive than any created anywhere else in human history, and which is now in profound crisis.

Trans-Europe Express

Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space

'In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies' Will Self During the course of the twentieth century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism. Landscapes of Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in cities. In exploring what that power was, Hatherley shows how much we can understand from surfaces - especially states as obsessed with surface as the Soviets were. Walking through these landscapes today, Hatherley discovers how, in contrast to the common dismissal of 'monolithic' Soviet architecture, these cities reflect with disconcerting transparency the development of an idea over the decades, with its sharp, sudden zigzags of official style: from modernism to classicism and back; to the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces and secret policemen's castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant garde ever dared. But most of all, Landscapes of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who knows what we might find?

A History Through Buildings

Landscapes of Communism

Artificial Islands

Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances

a history through buildings

The landscapes of Communism

The Public Voids of the Post-Soviet City

Across the Plaza

A darkly humorous architectural guide to the decrepit new Britain that neoliberalism built. Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of regenerating the inner cities left to rot under successive Conservative governments. Over the next decade, British cities became the laboratories of the new enterprise economy: glowing monuments to finance, property speculation, and the service industry—until the crash. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the wreckage—the buildings that epitomized an age of greed and aspiration. From Greenwich to Glasgow, Milton Keynes to Manchester, Hatherley maps the derelict Britain of the 2010s: from riverside apartment complexes, art galleries and amorphous interactive "centers," to shopping malls, call centers and factories turned into expensive lofts. In doing so, he provides a mordant commentary on the urban environment in which we live, work and consume. Scathing, forensic, bleakly humorous, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is a coruscating autopsy of a get-rich-quick, aspirational politics, a brilliant, architectural "state we're in."

an essay on Pulp

Uncommon

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a place that really existed, but it is long dead. By now, the word "Soviet" should be as meaningless as "Hapsburg". Yet it endures, as in the wave of "de-communisation" in Ukraine or the strange idea that the capitalist government in Russia is "Communist". But does the Soviet experience have anything to teach us today, or was it just an enormous cul-de-sac, a nuclear-armed reincarnation of the Russian Empire? This book tries to find out, through walking the towns and great cities of the USSR, in an itinerary that goes from the Baltic to Belarus, from Ukraine to the Urals, from the Caucasus to Central Asia, in places ranging from utopian colonies of the Twenties, to nuclear new towns of the Fifties, to gleaming new capitals of the 21st century. Ranging across eleven of the fifteen countries that once made up the Soviet Union, this book searches for the remnants of revolutions both distant and recent. and for the continuities with the Communist idea. Instead of a wistful journey through ruins, this is a Marxist Humanist account of how cities and their inhabitants have tried to cope both with the end of a socialist dream and the failure of capitalism to fulfill its own promises. In this patchwork of EU democracies, neoliberal dictatorships and Soviet nostalgic enclaves (often found in the same countries) we might just find the outlines of a way of building and living in cities that is a powerful alternative, both in the past and present.

The Adventures of Owen Hatherley In The Post-Soviet Space

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour’s architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition’s altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity. Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.

Journeys through Urban Britain

A New Kind of Bleak

Trans-Europe express. Alla ricerca di un continente perduto

An anatomy of failed-state Britain, by the author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour’s architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition’s altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity. Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.

A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain

Could Buster Keaton have starred in Battleship Potemkin?Did Trotsky plan to write the great Soviet comedy?And why did Lenin love circus clowns?The Chaplin Machine reveals the lighter side of the Communist avant-garde and its unlikely passion for American slapstick. Set against the backdrop of the great Russian revolutionary experiment, Owen Hatherley tells the tragic-comedic story of the cinema, art and architecture of the early 20th Century and spotlights the unlikely intersections of East and West.

Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-garde

The Chaplin Machine

If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty 'Common People', for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called 'Britpop', and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, they're nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously —very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.

How to make a fairer, more just city From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances

A polemical history of municipal socialism in London Ñ and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again. London is conventionally seen as merely a combination of the financial centre in the City and the centre of governmental power in Westminster, a uniquely capitalist capital city. This book is about the third London Ð a social democratic twentieth-century metropolis, a pioneer in council housing, public enterprise, socialist design, radical local democracy and multiculturalism. This book charts the development of this municipal power base under leaders from Herbert Morrison to Ken Livingstone, and its destruction in 1986, leaving a gap which has been only very inadequately filled by the Greater London Authority under Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Opposing currently fashionable bullshit about an imaginary "metropolitan elite", this book makes a case for London pride on the left, and makes an argument for using that pride as a weapon against a government of suburban landlords that ruthlessly exploits Londoners.

Owen Hatherley

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