Abstract

This talk, based on a book the speaker has been working on for the last two years, is part of an attempt to understand the ways in which East Asian developmental states, especially, in recent years, China, complicate or destroy conventional stories about modernism, development, capitalism and socialism, via looking at their architecture of the last few decades. A few particular typologies will be singled out – railways and railway stations, public toilets, public housing, megastructures and new towns – and it will be argued that in several ways now commonly discredited or disavowed modernist ideas have become a norm, and have thrived at moments in which they have been most fervently rejected in the global north’.

Owen Hatherley is a British writer and critic whose politically-engaged approach to architecture has made him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary urbanism. Since his 2009 debut ‘Militant Modernism’, which championed modernist architecture’s radical potential, he has explored Britain’s post-crash urban landscape, the legacy of communist architecture across Eastern Europe, and the spatial politics of contemporary cities in books including ‘Landscapes of Communism’, ‘The Ministry of Nostalgia’, and ‘Modern Buildings in Britain’. Writing regularly for ‘The Guardian’, ‘London Review of Books’, and ‘Jacobin’, Hatherley combines rigorous historical analysis with sharp critique, refusing nostalgia whilst excavating utopian possibilities from modernism’s fragments and insisting that how we build our cities remains fundamentally a question of power and radical possibility.