Owen Hatherley – författare

The definitive illustrated guide to modern British architecture returns in a beautiful new editionModernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain’s history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy – but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever.In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures – a number of which are threatened by demolition – two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed?With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in both duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

A walk through the remnants of a social democratic America, and an argument about its future.In the 1960s, a novel ideology about cities, and what was best for them, emerged in New York. Pushing against the state planning of the time, it held that cities were at their best when they were driven from the bottom-up and when organic, unplanned processes were allowed to run their course, in a spontaneous "ballet of the street". Cities were at their worst, however, when the state stepped in, demolishing lively old neighbourhoods and erecting giant, sterile, empty "projects". This book uses the method of this ideology - walking - to test how true it actually is about the "capital of the twentieth century", New York City, with a brief interlude in the capital, Washington DC.The "projects" that are walked in this book range from cultural complexes in Manhattan to New Deal-era public housing developments in Brooklyn, Harlem and Queens, from the social experiment of Roosevelt Island to Communist housing co-operatives in the Bronx, from the union-driven rebuilding of the Lower East Side to DC's magnificent Metro. For all their many flaws, they prove that Americans could, in fact, plan and build fragments of a better society, which survive and sometimes thrive today in one of the unequal places on earth. Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects takes a hard look at these enclaves, and asks what a new generation of American socialists might be able to learn from them.

'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 SelfDuring 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. 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?

'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 SelfDuring 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 scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today' Owen JonesA searching, timely account of the condition of contemporary Europe, told through the landscapes of its citiesOver the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by 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, 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. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it. 'The latest heir to Ruskin.' - Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could wish for.' - Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times 'Can one talk yet of vintage Hatherley? Yes, one can. Here are all the properties that have made him one of the most distinctive writers in England - not just 'architectural writers', but writers full stop: acuity, contrariness, observational rigour, frankness and beautifully wrought prose.' - Jonathan Meades

'Dazzling ... The remarkable story of how British culture was transformed by émigré architects, filmmakers and writers' Guardian Britain. Made in Europe.In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by 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, 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. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it.

The definitive illustrated guide to modern British architecture, from one of the most acclaimed critics at work todayModernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain's history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy - but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever.In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. Drawing on hundreds of examples, we learn how the concrete of Brutalism embodies post-war civic principles, how corporate values were expressed in the glass façades of the International Style, and why Ecomodernist experimentation is often consigned to the geographic fringes. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures - a number of which are threatened by demolition - two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed?With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

Britain. Made in Europe.A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of the Year 2025In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

'Dazzling ... The remarkable story of how British culture was transformed by émigré architects, filmmakers and writers' Guardian Britain. Made in Europe.In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. Combining memoir, history, portraits of particular places and things, Hatherley argues for those who have tried to create and imagine a better modernity, both in terms of architecture, such as Zaha Hadid or Ian Nairn, in terms of the urban space, like Jane Jacobs or Marshall Berman, and the way we see the world more widely, like Mark Fisher or Adam Curtis. Together, these outline a vision of the city as both as a place of political argument and dispute, and as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us.

From the grandiose histories of grand state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner pubs, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. Combining memoir, history, portraits of particular places and things, Hatherley argues for those who have tried to create and imagine a better modernity, both in terms of architecture, such as Zaha Hadid or Ian Nairn, in terms of the urban space, like Jane Jacobs or Marshall Berman, and the way we see the world more widely, like Mark Fisher or Adam Curtis. Together, these outline a vision of the city as both as a place of political argument and dispute, and as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us.

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."

"Militant Modernism" argues for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. It features new readings of some familiar names - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Mayakovsky - and much 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. Against the world of 'there is no alternative', this book talks about things we haven't done yet, in the past tense.

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.

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 - a social democratic twentieth-century metropolis, a pioneer in council housing, public enterprise, socialist design, radical local democracy and multiculturalism. If governmental power is embodied in the Palace of Westminster and financial power in the cluster of skyscrapers in the City, then this London is centred on the South Bank - County Hall, the Festival Hall, the National Theatre, Coin Street and City Hall. 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, Johnson and Khan. Rather than fashionable handwringing about the 'metropolitan elite', this book makes a case for London pride on the left, and an argument for reclaiming this history and using that pride as a weapon against a government of suburban landlords that ruthlessly exploits Londoners.

Great Britain has just left one Union, after years of bitter argument and divisiveposturing. But what if the island's future lies in another Union altogether, with some ofits former colonial “kith and kin” across the seas? Why be in a Union with yourimmediate neighbours, when you could instead be in a trans-oceanic super-state withour old friends in Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Welcome to the strange world ofthe 'CANZUK Union', the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify thewhite-majority 'Dominions' of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strongborders and climate change denialism.Artificial Islands tests the idea that Britain's natural allies and closest relations are inthese three countries in North America and the Antipodes, through a good look at thehistories, townscapes and spaces of several cities across the settler zones of the BritishEmpire. These are some of the most purely artificial and modern landscapes in theworld, British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seizedterritories on the other side of the world from Britain. Were these places really no morethan just a reproduction of British Values planted in unlikely corners of the globe? Howare people in Auckland, Melbourne, Montreal, Ottawa and Wellington re-imagining theirown history, or their countries' role in the British Empire and their complicity in itscrimes? And do they have any interest in a union with us?