Tours of a Lost Continent

Trans-Europe Express

A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today

The best book I've read on Europe, blending history, architecture and contemporary politics and written in Owen Hatherley's trademark mixture of scepticism, erudition and humanity. He is a writer of lasting merit who will be read fifty years from now.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, The Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism, The Ministry of Nostalgia and The Chaplin Machine.

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 History Through Buildings

Landscapes of Communism

'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. 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?

Can one talk yet of vintage Hatherley? Yes, one can. Here are all the properties that have made him one of the most distinctive writers in England - not just 'architectural writers', but  writers full stop: acuity, contrariness, observational rigour, frankness and beautifully wrought prose. This is a tempered  love letter to eastern Europe and a fullblown love letter to an eastern European woman. I can't think of anything remotely akin

Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could wish for.

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

The Alienation Effect

A momentous history of the 1930s émigré generation, and how they reshaped Britain 
 
As the horrors of fascism ran riot through Europe in the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans, most of them Jewish and many of them artists, fled their countries seeking sanctuary in an imperial island at the edge of the continent. The world they found when they reached these shores – damp, grey and parochial – was a far cry from the modernity and dynamism of Weimar Berlin, Red Vienna or modernist Prague, but it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever. 
 
In The Alienation Effect, the historian Owen Hatherley leads us into the technicolour world of this exiled generation of artists and intellects, from celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger to forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass. Across four expansive sections – the photograph and the film; the book; the work of art; the building and the city – Hatherley shows that, in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, the cornerstones of our visual culture, and thus our imaginations, were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too. 
 
The émigrés changed how we saw the world and their legacy is everywhere around us. But today we are in danger of forgetting our proud tradition of asylum, and the vital cultural exchange it engenders. The Alienation Effect is therefore both a celebration and a warning: we must rediscover this spirit and open our hearts once again, before it is too late.

As the horrors of fascism ran riot through Europe in the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans, most of them Jewish and many of them artists, fled their countries seeking sanctuary in an imperial island at the edge of the continent. The world they found when they reached these shores – damp, grey and parochial – was a far cry from the modernity and dynamism of Weimar Berlin, Red Vienna or modernist Prague, but it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever. 
 
In The Alienation Effect, the historian Owen Hatherley leads us into the technicolour world of this exiled generation of artists and intellects, from celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger to forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass. Across four expansive sections – the photograph and the film; the book; the work of art; the building and the city – Hatherley shows that, in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, the cornerstones of our visual culture, and thus our imaginations, were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too. 
 
The émigrés changed how we saw the world and their legacy is everywhere around us. But today we are in danger of forgetting our proud tradition of asylum, and the vital cultural exchange it engenders. The Alienation Effect is therefore both a celebration and a warning: we must rediscover this spirit and open our hearts once again, before it is too late.

Owen Hatherley is the author of many books on aesthetics and politics, including Landscapes of Communism, Trans-Europe Express and Modern Buildings in Britain. He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin.

Owen Hatherley

A Gazetteer

Modernism is now a century old, and its consequences are all around us, built into our everyday lived environments. Its place in Britain&rsquo;s history is fiercely contested, and its role in our future is the subject of ongoing controversy &ndash; but modernist buildings have undoubtedly changed our cities, politics and identity forever. 
In Modern Buildings in Britain, Owen Hatherley applauds the ambition and explores the significance of this most divisive of architectures, travelling from Aberystwyth to Aberdeen, from St Ives to Shetland, in search of our most important and distinctive modern buildings. As Hatherley considers the social, political and cultural value of these structures &ndash; a number of which are threatened by demolition &ndash; two linked questions emerge: what happens to a building after it has been lived in, and what becomes of an idea when its time has passed? 
With more than six hundred pages of trenchantly opinionated, often witty analysis, and with three hundred photographs in both duotone and colour, Modern Buildings in Britain is a landmark contribution to the history of British architecture.

Owen Hatherley

Modern Buildings in Britain

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