AR Reading List 019: The writings of Owen Hatherley

For the latest episode of our new podcast, the AR Bookshelf, we spoke to Owen Hatherley about Southampton’s secrets, how to solve the housing crisis and why Brutalism mania has gone too far. This reading list looks back at several of his essays, published in the pages of the AR, on topics from Zaha Hadid to Lubetkin to urbanism in North Korea.

Based in London, Hatherley’s writing is prolific, engaging persistently with context and capital – with one of his books, Trans-Europe Express, described by Huw Lemmey in the pages of the AR as ‘a thoughtful, sharp and personal look at how Europe uses architecture to tell stories about itself, and an excavation of the political realities behind its own fairytales.’ To listen to the episode and find out more about Hatherley’s bookshelf bibliography, click here

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• Bounds of possibility: writing at the edges of Europe, AR May 2019
  ‘We come to see the Cold War not as an anomaly, but one of several violent border-makings inflicted on these people over the last 100 years’
• Reputations: Zaha Hadid, AR March 2018
  ‘There was always something sad in the way that the hugely wasteful but fascinating steel skeletons of these later “Parametric” buildings would be covered with perfunctory shiny cladding’
• Northern accent: urbanism and ephemera in North Korea, AR February 2018
  ‘North Korea can do 21st-century modernity if it wants to; commercial units are starting to supplant kindergartens and other “socialist” amenities’
• St Petersburg: the city of three revolutions, AR October 2017
  ‘St Petersburg’s apartments were audited and split up during the bloody Civil War, with one result being extreme subdivision – several families in one huge, high-ceilinged imperial flat’
• AR 120: Owen Hatherley on Context, AR December 2016 / January 2017
  ‘Townscape was a mini-movement in favour of architectural and temporal diversity, against masterplans and visual homogeneity’
• Parallel lives: what happens when different lives coexist on the same street, AR July / August 2016
  ‘In 20 years Inner London may really be like Paris, a wealthy centre surrounded by racialised poverty’
• Lubetkin in Russia: From civil war-ravaged USSR to Socialist Realism, AR October 2014
  ‘Lubetkin was a lifelong Marxist, and it is this especially that was expected to alarm the readers of the AR in 1932’