Kraftwerk seemed to be aiming at a kind of electronic Esperanto, an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to.
Owen Hatherley’s most recent book is Transitional Objects: Photographs of Poland.
Kraftwerk seemed to be aiming at a kind of electronic Esperanto, an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to.
The Jubilee Line used to be one of the better London Underground lines to travel on if, like me, you have Crohn’s disease. When the line was extended in the late 1990s, some of the new stations – Stratford, Canada Water, North Greenwich – were equipped with toilets, a great rarity on the Tube. They weren’t very nice, but if you’re liable to need the loo...
In Enrica Colusso’s film Home Sweet Home, about the recently ‘decanted’ Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, southeast London, a town planner explains why nearly all the buildings around him – a large council estate and a covered shopping centre – have to be demolished. They’re not real streets, he says. They’re monocultures – allowing for...
‘For us,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above...
In the end postcapitalism, like postmodernism, is the name of an absence, not a positive programme. Like the anticapitalism of the early 2000s, it tells you what it’s not: in this case, the old left, folk politics, social democracy or Stalinism, with their hierarchies and lack of cool free stuff. Postcapitalism, like precapitalism, could be feudalism or slavery or some Threads-like nightmare of devastated cities and radioactive nomads. It tells you that the forces of production make something possible, then suggests either that you demand it, or that you’re already doing it.
Owen Hatherley talks to Ash Sarkar about his latest book Red Metropolis, in which he looks at the red underbelly of London, Capital of world capitalism.
London’s promotion to the status of ‘world city’ in the past twenty years has less to do with its diversity than with the opportunities it presents for property investments more stable than gold,...
Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful.
Owen Hatherley understands the dangers of ‘nostalgia for the future’, but he’s too far gone to pull out.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.