Owen Hatherley

Who is Owen Hatherley?

Owen Hatherley is a British writer and journalist based in London who writes primarily on architecture, politics and culture.

His first book Militant Modernism was published by Zero Books in 2009. The Guardian described the book as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism". Icon described the book as "sparky, polemical and ferociously learned" although it "falters a little towards the end", whilst Jonathan Meades in New Statesman described the book as a "deflected Bildungsroman of a very clever, velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic for yesterday’s tomorrow, for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which, even though it still exists in scattered fragments, has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled" and Hatherley "as a commentator on architecture...in a school of one". The journal Planning Perspectives suggested that the book "nicely explores the irony of the potential status of the remains of future-oriented architecture and urban design as ‘modern heritage'"

His book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain was published by Verso in 2010.