Archinect - News

The Guardian picks up on the contentious debate surrounding modernist preservation in the UK

2022-04-04T18:44:00-04:00

A trio of concerned letter writers replied to a March 31st opinion piece by The Guardian’s Owen Hatherley in which the critic declared that “hardline modern architecture is now something of a cult.”

“A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and depopulation that happens when you conserve everything, and the visual slurry that occurs if you let developers do what they like,” Hatherley wrote. “The result has been a new tension between different notions of conservation. This is a tension that serves mainly to benefit property developers, who can make money both from new buildings, and as 'saviors' of great modern buildings at the cost of destroying their original purely social purpose, as has happened in the privatisation of London’s Keeling House or Sheffield’s Park Hill.”

The Twentieth Century Society’s London Director Catherine ...

Thoughts on better post-pandemic cities

2021-01-25T17:58:00-05:00

The pandemic has underlined how broken the UK’s model for urban development is. [...] It is hard to see now amid the depression and anger, but the pandemic did briefly show cities acting on the basis of general human need: rough sleepers being housed, mutual aid groups being set up, evictions being suspended. Yet the possibility of any long-term change is rapidly being lost.

Tribune culture editor Owen Hatherly's new housing opinion piece for The Guardian.

Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube

2017-05-09T15:57:00-04:00

Both Vienna and Budapest can be viewed as battlefields in an unfolding European crisis of identity and confidence that threatens the continent’s political unity and raises fundamental questions about what exactly it means to be European, to be Europe. Can we read these crises at the level of architecture?

In light of contemporary political turmoil in the region, Owen Hatherley examines key moments in the architectural histories of two quintessentially European cities, from the development of Vienna's monumental public housing to Budapest's experimentation with an ethnonationalist style.

Owen Hatherley's history of communist architecture remains "under the spell of socialism"

2015-09-10T13:52:00-04:00

To [Hatherley], architecture is the physical manifestation of politics. It is power literally in bricks and mortar. In this respect he is unusual and, I believe, right. But he is handicapped at every turn by his belief, worn on his sleeve, in the nobility of the socialist cause. This can be an asset as he wrestles manfully to evoke the spirit of places from which most of us would turn in horror.

More from British architecture writer Owen Hatherley here, and on communist architecture:

A half-hearted defense of Calatrava

2014-02-07T11:01:00-05:00

Though easy targets for fiscal hawks, public architecture that’s luxurious and dramatic — even excessive — should be ours as a right.

Owen Hatherly has published a piece praising "white elephant" architectural projects.

Plans to recreate the Crystal Palace are as jingoistic as a Gove history lesson

2013-07-30T05:05:00-04:00

Chinese cities have recently become notorious for their sheer degree of copying and reproduction, with hundreds of replicas of famous historic buildings and even of recent ones – such as the copy of Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, under construction almost immediately after the original was completed. But in London, the Crystal Palace replica is only the most vast – and probably the least likely – of a smaller but still significant series of proposed reconstructions.

The architectural dreams that never came down to earth

2012-12-05T14:17:00-05:00

Produced as a diploma project in 1928, it justified itself by pointing out – as generations of environmentalists would later insist – the need to minimise human impact on the planet. Except rather than treading lightly on it, we wouldn't be treading on it at all, but living in flying mobile homes, which could dock at collective housing, hotels, factories and leisure centres, able to descend to the earth to enjoy it unspoilt.

The Lloyd's building is a time machine

2011-12-22T18:59:47-05:00

Richard Rogers's 1986 headquarters for the insurers Lloyd's of London has just been listed Grade I. This makes it, along with the Royal Festival Hall, one of the few 20th-century structures to be placed at the same level as, say, St Paul's. But, like the gothic cathedrals it so closely resembles, Lloyd's was not meant to be an entirely finished product. Look up to the top of its facade, and you'll find cranes are still there...

Owen Hatherley's Viewpoint: Why does regeneration create so many ugly buildings?

2011-08-18T18:18:30-04:00

This was the city of the 20th Century, but surely nobody, neither utopians or dystopians, imagined that it would look like this. It was nobody's dream and at least in theory, nobody's nightmare. How did we get here?

In his colorful article, Owen Hatherley, architecture critic and occasional Archinect editor, confronts the ugliness and its legacy 20th century post modern style buildings left the cities with.