Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley’s book, The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century will be published by Allen Lane in March. His previous books include Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane) and Modern Buildings in Britain (Particular Books).

The modernist building that brought spies and socialism to Belsize Park

The Isokon Building has become an architectural icon, but its own history is full of scandal and Central European emigrés

13 March 2025

The loneliest Bauhaus architect in America – The Brutalist, reviewed

Brady Corbet’s epically long film starring Adrien Brody as a Bauhaus-trained architect in America conveniently pretends that all the real Bauhaus-trained architects who made it to America never existed

6 February 2025

How the Bauhaus exiles shaped a new urban landscape

The westward spread of modernist design between the wars was shaped by the migrant experience

3 January 2024

How to rebuild a Central European city

The reconstruction of cities devastated by the Second World War took radically different forms, depending on the circumstances

30 May 2023

The good, the bad and the ugly – neoclassical architecture in modern times

It was the favoured architectural style of Stalin and the Nazis. What forms does classical revivalism take today?

2 January 2019

Why are there mass protests about Moscow’s mass-produced housing?

Moscow’s Khrushchev-era apartment blocks are hardly good housing, but their residents are unlikely to get a better replacement

14 June 2017

Rewriting the past: must Rhodes fall?

A statue of Cecil Rhodes will stand at Oriel College, Oxford, in place despite calls for its removal, but debates about ‘erasing history’ rumble on

29 January 2016

‘Without a palace of glass, life is a burdensome task.’ Paul Scheerbart’s utopian fantasies

'Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader' reviewed

28 November 2015