• Wednesday 27th February 2013
• 3PM – Note: This is an afternoon lecture
• Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre / M055
• Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus

Modern architecture was uniquely both the first architecture to devote itself consciously to the transformation of existing society and to its own documentation in photographs. This talk will argue that in doing both at once, modernism has often produced huge contradictions and tensions, between the impeccable, historically untouched and depopulated image, and, out of shot, the messy and complex social life of the buildings depicted. It will be argued that it’s this tension that leads to the eventual creation of an architectural image-world divorced from all referent in place altogether, seen best in the world of Dezeen and the coffee table architecture press.

Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received his doctorate in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London for a thesis on ‘The Political Aesthetics of Americanism in Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-34’. He works as a freelance writer on architecture and cultural politics, and is the author of four books – Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), and an e-book on squares in eastern Europe, Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012).