Owen Hatherley
British writer (born 1981)
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Hatherley was born on 24 July 1981, in Southampton, growing up in a 1930s suburban estate. He describes his parents as "trots" who were members of Militant. At the age of 12, he moved to the Flowers Estate in Bassett Green, which he disliked, later saying: "I couldn't wait to get out of the sodding place, and the pitched roofs and front gardens didn’t exactly relieve the unpleasantness." When he was 16, he read England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage, which inspired him to move to London to study. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating in 2001. He then received a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2011. His supervisor was Esther Leslie.
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Writing
Hatherley started a blog, The Measures Taken, in 2005. He would go on to publish pieces elsewhere, including articles for Socialist Worker from 2006 to 2008, articles for New Humanist since 2007, and articles for Building Design from 2008 to 2014.
Hatherley's 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"; while Jonathan Meades in the 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, which was based on a series of articles he wrote for Building Design, was published by Verso in 2010. Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings, a history of communism in Europe told through the built environments of former socialist states, was published by Allen Lane in June 2015. In 2018, he released two books, Trans-Europe Express with Allen Lane, and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space with Repeater Books.
Hatherley has written for Dezeen, Building Design, The Guardian, Icon, the London Review of Books, New Humanist, the New Statesman, Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, Dissent and Jacobin Magazine. He has maintained three blogs, Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, The Measures Taken and Kino Fist.
Politics
Hatherley has described himself as a communist "at least in the sense in which the word was used in The Communist Manifesto". He wrote that "revolution might be a rather exciting thing, one that would transform the world, and transform space, for the better. Worth doing. Why not try it."
Amidst Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Hatherley argued that the political left must fully support Ukraine, writing, "Ukraine is a fake country only in the ways that all countries are fake, and it is real in the way that any others are real. It has the same right to exist and the same right to peace as any others."