Education
Goldsmiths, University of London.
( When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade c...)
When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain, often populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism. Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: 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. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communismwhat residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1620971887/?tag=2022091-20
(This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on ...)
This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call “the progressive nonsense” of the Big Society agenda. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain’s urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes “broken Britain,” Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like. Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1781680752/?tag=2022091-20
(Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of ...)
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.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844677001/?tag=2022091-20
(Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many ...)
Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film and architecture - especially architecture ― and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar ― Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky. Through Hatherley's eyes we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century - lesser lights, too ― perhaps understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain's brutalist aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to Modernism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1846941768/?tag=2022091-20
Goldsmiths, University of London.
His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. Icon described the book as "sparky, polemical and ferociously learned" although it "falters a little towards the end", whilst Jonathan Meades in New Statesman described the book as a "deflected Bildungsroman of a very clever, velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic for yesterday’s tomorrow, for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which, even though it still exists in scattered fragments, has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled" and Hatherley "as a commentator on architecture..in a school of one". The journal Planning Perspectives suggested that the book "nicely explores the irony of the potential status of the remains of future-oriented architecture and urban design as ‘modern heritage""
His book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.
Hatherley has written for Dezeen, Building Design, The Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review and Socialist Worker.
He has maintained three blogs, Sit down man, you"re a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken and Kino Fist. Hatherley has described himself as a communist "at least in the sense in which the word was used in The Communist Manifesto".
He wrote that “revolution might be a rather exciting thing, one that would transform the world, and transform space, for the better. Worth doing. Why not try lieutenant”.
( When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade c...)
(This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on ...)
(Back in 1997, New Labour came to power amid much talk of ...)
(Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many ...)
The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to "excavate utopia" from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism". Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings, a history of communism in Europe told through the built environments of former socialist states, was published by Allen Lane in June 2015.