Owen Hatherley je britský spisovatel a novinář, který se ve své práci zaměřuje především na architekturu, politiku a kulturu. Jeho psaní zkoumá vzájemné propojení těchto oblastí a nabízí pronikavý pohled na to, jak formují náš svět. Prostřednictvím svých esejů a reportáží Hatherley kriticky analyzuje současné společenské trendy a jejich historické kořeny. Jeho bystré postřehy a nápaditý styl činí jeho díla poutavým čtením pro každého, kdo se zajímá o složitosti moderní společnosti.
How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century
464 stránek
17 hodin čtení
Set in the 1930s, the narrative explores the impact of refugees fleeing fascism in Europe, particularly Jewish individuals, on British society. Their arrival introduced transformative ideas in art, politics, and architecture, significantly shaping modern Britain. The book delves into how these revolutionary concepts influenced the cultural landscape and contributed to the evolution of British identity during a tumultuous period.
A walk through the remnants of a social democratic America, and an argument about its future. Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects is an insightful exploration of the remnants of a social democratic America and a thought-provoking argument about its future. The book traces the rise of a 1960s urban ideology that celebrated bottom-up, organic city development while criticising state-led planning that resulted in lifeless, sterile "projects." Using walking as a method, the author tests these ideas across New York City, with a brief interlude in Washington, DC, examining a wide array of urban developments. Key areas explored: - Cultural complexes in Manhattan - New Deal-era public housing in Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens - Roosevelt Island’s social experiment - Communist housing co-operatives in the Bronx - Union-led rebuilding of the Lower East Side - DC's Metro system By walking through these spaces, the book reveals that, despite their flaws, fragments of a more equal society were built in the past and continue to thrive today. Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects asks what lessons a new generation of American socialists might learn from these surviving social democratic enclaves as they envision a better future.
This illustrated guide offers a comprehensive exploration of contemporary British architecture, showcasing the work of renowned critics. It delves into the evolution of architectural styles, highlighting key buildings and their significance in modern design. The book combines insightful analysis with striking visuals, making it an essential resource for architecture enthusiasts and professionals alike.
Should Britain form a new union with its old 'Dominions' in Canada, Australia
andNew Zealand? Are they really our closest allies and relations? And is there
any reasonwhy they should want to unite again with us?
How to make a fairer, more just city From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.
Kniha Owena Hatherleyho zkoumá nové pohledy
na modernismus 20. století: věnuje se modernímu
designu, filmu, popu, pozornost je zaostřena
především na architekturu (ať už z hlediska
ruského konstruktivismu či britského brutalismu).
Dotýká se témat utopických sociálních projektů
v první sovětské pětiletce i radikálních vizí
Wilhelma Reicha (Sexpol), zkoumajících odcizující
efekty každodenního modernistického života
ve snaze o transformaci a determinaci nových
zítřků. Owen Hatherley přináší ve své monografii
hned několik prvků, které mohou být českému
diskurzu přínosné. Autor se například nebojí pracovat
s levicovými koncepty, ukazuje, že bez hlubokého
pochopení komunistické ideologie a praxe
nemůžeme pochopit modernistickou kulturu
nejen v Sovětském svazu. Kniha je doprovozena
obrazovým materiálem a rozsáhlým poznámkovým
aparátem. Grafika Kateřina Šuterová.
Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world:
a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls,
imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which,
interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a
combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. In
Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city
across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the
Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces
common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European
city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it.
"'A searching, timely account of the condition of contemporary Europe, told through the landscapes of its cities. Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it."--Provided by publisher
In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of
things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the
contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social
realities it embodies. (Will Self). During the course of the twentieth
century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own
image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to
transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast
housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the
regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin,
Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy,
remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the
collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism. Landscapes of
Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told
through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in
cities.In exploring what that power was, Hatherley shows how much we can
understand from surfaces - especially states as obsessed with surface as the
Soviets were. Walking through these landscapes today, Hatherley discovers how,
in contrast to the common dismissal of 'monolithic' Soviet architecture, these
cities reflect with disconcerting transparency the development of an idea over
the decades, with its sharp, sudden zigzags of official style: from modernism
to classicism and back; to the superstitious despotic rococo of high
Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces and secret policemen's
castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the
metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space
that went further than any avant garde ever dared. But most of all, Landscapes
of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the
maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the
massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who
knows what we might find?