Bøker av Owen Hatherley

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.

'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?

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of people fled fascism in continental Europe for the safety of the British Isles. These refugees - many of them Jewish - brought with them a set of revolutionary ideas and practices about art, politics and architecture which were to change the face of modern Britain. Exiles is the little-known story of their lives and work. In its teeming pages we meet artists from Weimar Germany, psychoanalysts from Freud's Vienna, communists from Russia and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, all trying to make their way in a cold and foreign land. Some were enchanted by the quaintness and eccentricity of traditional England; others were repelled by its rigid class hierarchy, repressed national character and resistance to change. In all of these encounters, cultural conflict gave rise to new artistic and political movements, from Brutalism to neoliberalism, as the exiled Europeans took the cornerstones of British culture and reimagined them. In doing so, this refugee generation created the world we live in today, and achieved that most British of feats: a quiet revolution.

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.

Should Britain form a new union with its old 'Dominions' in Canada, Australia andNew Zealand? Are they really our closest allies and relations? And is there any reasonwhy they should want to unite again with us?

A polemical history of municipal socialism in London - and an argument for turning this capitalist capital red again.

Owen Hatherley takes us on a transcontinental tour of the cities of the former Soviet Union, discovering what they can teach us about changing our cities for the better.

Sixteen short essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English Architectural writer of the Twentieth Century.

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, theyre 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.