‘Everything you do is a political act’: Owen Hatherley’s AR Bookshelf

The AR Bookshelf is a podcast by The Architectural Review. The idea is very simple: we ask each guest to put books on an imaginary bookshelf and tell us their story.

Walking us around his bookshelf, Owen Hatherley takes us on a journey from Southampton to Moscow, via Los Angeles, London and Warsaw, all without leaving home. Jane Jacobs, Angela Carter, Julie Birchill any many others all join us on the way.

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Based in London, Hatherley writes about architecture and politics, and is the author of several books, including Landscapes of Communism from 2015, The Ministry of Nostalgia in 2016, The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space in 2018 and Trans-Europe Express the same year, 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.’ Hatherley is culture editor at socialist magazine Tribune and contributes regularly to the Guardian, Dezeen and many others, including the AR where he has written about everything from the gentrification of London’s disused buildings to North Korean urbanism to Zaha Hadid’s Reputations. Read more of Owen Hatherley’s writing in the AR here.

Owen Hatherley’s AR Bookshelf bibliography:

Respectable: The Experience of Class, Lynsey Hanley, 2017
An Anatomy of Sprawl: Planning and Politics in Britain, Nicholas Phelps, 2012
Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, 1994
England’s Post-War Listed Buildings, Elain Hardwood, 2003
Architecture in the Age of Stalin - Culture Two, Vladimir Paperny, 1985
Cliches of Urban Doom and other essays, Ruth Glass, 1989
City of Quartz, Mike Davis, 1990
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham, 1971
Urban Warfare, Raquel Rolnik, 2015 (English translation 2019) (read Hatherley’s piece in the AR here)
Project Interrupted: Lectures by British Housing Architects, Architecture Foundation, 2018
The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, Ellen Mieksins Wood, 1991
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud, 1901 (1938 Pelican edition)
Ambition, Julie Burchill, 1989
Shaking a Leg, Angela Carter, 1997
Stony Limits, Hugh MacDiarmid, 1934
MDM-Marszalkowska 1730-1954, 1955
Moscow Metro, 1970s
Poems, Part 1, 2 and3, Bertolt Brecht (1976 edition)

Books by Owen Hatherley:

Militant Modernism, 2009
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, 2010
Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp, 2011
A New Kind of Bleak, 2012
Landscapes of Communism, 2015
The Ministry of Nostalgia, 2016
The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde, 2016
Trans-Europe Express, 2018
The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space, 2018
Red Metropolis, 2020

‘A lot of what architects are involved in – and it has always been thus – is pretty morally dubious’

The book you wish you’d written:

Respectable: The Experience of Class, Lynsey Hanley, 2017
An Anatomy of Sprawl: Planning and Politics in Britain, Nicholas Phelps, 2012

I don’t really wish I’d written them but these are books on subjects very close to my heart that I would have written about if they hadn’t been done so so brilliantly by these authors.

The book I would give to an architecture student is:

Architecture in the Age of Stalin - Culture Two, Vladimir Paperny, 1985

This is exactly how I would like to see 20th century architecture written about more. Paperny takes you through the entirety of 20th century Soviet architecture to explain this absolutely bizarre architecture that emerges, particularly after the Second World War. It’s wild.

Clichés of Urban Doom and other essays, Ruth Glass, 1989

Ruth Glass is probably best known now for coining the term ‘gentrification’. Modern architecture is seen as in some way inculcating poverty in people, and it’s nonsense. I can understand why architects wouldn’t want to to know too much about politics. A lot of what architects are involved in – and it has always been thus – is pretty morally dubious. I don’t think it is possible to be apolitical. You might not think about the ways in which you are political, but everything you do is a political act.

The book everyone should read about injustice:

City of Quartz, Mike Davis, 1990

Many architects will have read Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, but what that book leaves out is that in order for the pleasant car and surfer culture to exist, an enormous regime of police brutality and white supremacy had to be erected. Davis treats it like a Marxist private detective, and tells you where the bodies are buried and who to blame.

The book that changed your mind:

The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, Ellen Mieksins Wood, 1991

It’s not a big mind-changing, but I went from thinking Britain is terrible because it’s uniquely backward in Europe to thinking that Britain is terrible because it’s uniquely capitalist because of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism.

The book whose cover you would have on my wall:

I actually currently have the cover of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life on my wall – Pelican edition naturally.

The book I ought to have read but haven’t:

All of the big Russian ones.

The book no one can ever know you’ve read:

I used to have a very unhealthy obsession with Julie Burchill’s novel Ambition.

The one book you would take into quarantine:

Shaking a Leg, Angela Carter, 1997

The five books you would save from the bonfire

My grandfather’s signed copy of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Stony Limits
MDM-Marszalkowska 1730-1954, a big album on the post-war rebuilding of Warsaw
A 1970s photobook on the Moscow Metro just called Moscow Metro
My copies of the three-volume Bertolt Brecht Poems, which used to belong to Angela Carter
My copy of City of Quartz, for the same reason as above