owen-hatherley

85 Articles by:

Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley is a writer and editor, whose latest book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC is out now.

Lenin at Leisure

A vivid, rediscovered anthology — compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher — assembles a surprising portrait of the Soviet revolutionary built from letters, memoirs, and fragments.

Modernism for the Many

In the 1960s, Kate Macintosh designed modernist public housing for the elderly. Her buildings are monuments to what architecture can achieve when liberated from the constraints of the property market.

What Was the Soviet Union?

Owen Hatherly sits down with historian Sheila Fitzpatrick to discuss how her work challenged orthodox understandings of the USSR — how its dissolution shaped the politics of modern-day Russia and the former socialist republics.

The Future of the Back Pages

The Tribune culture section may not always look like it, but it is part of the same project as the rest of the magazine — trying to provide historical grounding for a new left; but we need to look forward, too.

Defining Modernist Architecture

The roots of modernist architecture are explicitly reformist and socialist – yet it continues to defy contemporary characterisation as either an elite conspiracy or a monument to unfulfilled utopia, writes Owen Hatherley.

The Head Boy In the Bubble

Rishi Sunak might have grown up in an industrial city, but he spent most of his life in a bubble – made clear not only by the fact he never made any working-class friends, but that he seems to understand nothing about strikes.

The Landscape of Treason

The Cold War ‘Red Scare’ went alongside a ‘Lavender Scare’, which saw the police ramp up their surveillance and blackmail of gay men. A new film inspired by the Cambridge Spies explores the relationship between the two.

A Revolution of Things

In the 1990s, artist Vladimir Arkhipov started to collect home-made objects in homes, markets, and junk shops. Today, his archive is both a document of poverty and a vision of liberated labour.

Doreen Massey’s Radical 1980s

A new collection of writings by geographer Doreen Massey features intense dispatches from the political battlegrounds of the 1980s, which remind us that even in eras of defeat, there are vital moments of hope.

Red Library: Science Fiction

There has always been an affinity between socialism and science fiction, a genre that makes clear it is still possible to imagine new societies — however much our miserable politics might claim otherwise.