Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings

'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. 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?

Arts & Photography

Hatherley, Owen

Architecture

Penguin Press

Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Allen Lane.

Over the past 20 years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centers, 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-centered, 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.

Penguin

Modernism 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 faç ades 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.

Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer

History & Criticism

Particular Books

There was something uncanny about Charlie Chaplin. His fellow actors spoke of him as inhuman—automaton-like. His stiff, comic movements could be viewed as an attempt to parody the newly developed production lines of Henry Ford’s revolutionary factories. As wide-scale application of this technology spread to Soviet Russia, Chaplin’s slapstick comedic style also found a following among the artists carving out a new society under communism. In The Chaplin Machine, Owen Hatherley unearths the hidden history of Soviet film, art, and architecture. Turning upside down the common view that the communist avant-garde was austere and humorless, he reveals an unexpected comedic streak that found its inspiration in the slapstick of the American performers Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. What did it mean for socialists to combine the ideas of Chaplin and Ford? Were their experiments indicative of a new future conception of work and leisure? And to what degree was this emphasis on comedy a precursor to the strangely festive despotism of Stalin? By asking these questions, The Chaplin Machine challenges our understanding of twentieth-century art in America and abroad.

The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the International Communist Avant-Garde

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Pluto Press

Gathering a wide range of art from around the world, Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity explores the enduring human desire to build farther and farther into the sky. Examined here are themes such as verticality, personification, urban critique, improvisation and the vulnerability of landmark buildings. Skyscraper features the work of about 50 artists, including Francis Alÿs, Ziad Antar, Fikret Atay, Erica Bohm, Jennifer Bolande, Marie Bovo, Roe Ethridge, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Cyprien Gaillard, Jakob Kolding, Vera Lutter, Claes Oldenburg, Gabriel Orozco, Thomas Ruff, Andy Warhol, Peter Wegner, Wesley Willis, Catherine Yass, Yin Xiuzhen and Shizuka Yokomizo. Skyscraper also features documentation of artist Monika Sosnowska’s process of creating new work commissioned for the exhibition this catalogue accompanies.

Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity

Darling, Michael

Szupinska, Joanna

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum Of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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?

History

Americas

The New Press

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

Europe

Verso

The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

Verso Books

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.

Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

Business & Money

Economics

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