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Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism


The Modernist[1] design aesthetic is so tightly woven into our Ikea-furnished everyday lives that it is rather easy to forget its origins as an attempted movement toward a Utopian fantasy of the built environment. In visual contrast to many proto-Modern design practices, the Corbusian aesthetics that emerged in the early twentieth century exhibited an at times brutally rigid geometric quality. A stylistically modern organization of space seemed to respond to the contemporaneous disarray of the wartime human condition by making a silent demand for a more controlled way of life. Indeed, as modern architect Berthold Lubetkin stated, “The philosophical aim and orderly character of [Modernist] designs are diametrically opposed to the intellectual climate in which we live . . . my personal interpretation is that these buildings cry out for a world that has never come into being.”[2] In other words, modern architecture seems to have been the defense mechanism of a zeitgeist. It tried—as some would argue, in vain–to represent an environmental solution to a problem that was actually unsolvable.

Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism, published in 2009, is a work of contextual and social architectural history that reexamines the knotty discourse of the “death of Modernism.” Hatherley maintains that the Left Modernisms[3] of the twentieth century comprise untapped guidebooks that could provide our contemporary society with clues as to how to build a less dystopian future. Hatherley argues aggressively, through un-mined and unexpected examples of architecture, design, film, and political events, that Modernism is not merely the chapter in history followed by Postmodernism, but is in fact an overarching Utopian social scheme. We can therefore recognize the spirit of Modernism in past, present, and future.

Cover of second issue of Wyndham Lewis's Blast Magazine, July 1915
In a chapter on British Brutalism, Hatherley provides a context to explain the social conditions under which Modernism ‘failed’ in Britain. The irony of this is patent: modern architecture did not catch on in the very birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Yet the later prominence of Brutalism in 1950s to 1970s Britain complicates this oft-expressed sound bite, and Hatherley illustrates this disjuncture by using regional, psychological and political analysis to elucidate the role of “Englishness” in Brutalism. His methodology adeptly clarifies the Vorticist architectural movement–Britain’s answer to Italian Futurism and French Cubism–as a culturally grounded exploration of the machine by duly addressing how Vorticism related to Futurism and Cubism.

Ivan Zholtovsky, MoGes Power Plant, Moscow, 1926. Photograph by Richard Pare.

Hatherley also does a brilliant job in telling the Soviet story, a monumental episode that has often been glossed over or omitted entirely in modern architecture history books. His thesis of Soviet modernism hinges upon a preoccupation with the interstellar/spatial, which he supports through rigorous formal analysis of film and a consideration of various architectural projects. Yet the political climate within which Constructivism conceptually coalesced should under no circumstances be excised from the conversation. The author thus spends time addressing the Constructivist ruins photographed by Richard Pare in The Lost Vanguard. Pare’s structural subjects embody, for Hatherley, “the gleaming seamless surfaces, revolutionary optimism and technocratic zeal having long since been overtaken by weathering, their concrete cracked, their artificial, glaring paintwork faded and crumbling and the technical rhetoric shown to conceal medieval construction techniques.”[4] The insight that the crumbling remains of these monuments, so emotionally infused with hope for a radical new way of life, “finally [resemble] the architects’ original concept”[5] is both illuminating and haunting in its disclosure about the culture of Modernism. Hatherley’s explanations of then-radical ideas about communical housing, everyday life or byt, as well as his situating of the Russian avant-garde within the greater historical narrative of Euro-American architectural history are instructive.

Militant Modernism excels as a work of contextual and social history. Hatherley’s approach is one that aligns well with my own methodological leanings and how I consider contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism. This book review can in a sense be viewed as a framing device for future posts. Through captivating and fresh examples, Hatherley’s book demonstrates why the provision of social context, particularly in architectural history, ought to be non-negotiable. Ironically, a quotation from Wyndham Lewis’s architectonic (read: formalist) perspective most cogently explains why this should be so: “Architecture is the weakest of the arts, in so far as it is the most dependent on the collective sensibility of the period . . . if the world would only build temples to machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect.”[6]

Kat Koh is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She studies 20th century architecture, focusing on built structures of the Russian avant-garde and architectural photography.


1. In this piece, “Modernist,” capitalized, will signify the discourse, ideological exchange, built and unbuilt projects of the so-called high era of the modern architecture commonly referred to as the Modern Movement, ca. 1920s-1930s.
2. John Allan, Lubetkin and the Tradition of Progress, (RIBA, 1992), 366.
3. Hatherley is referring to the Left Modernism debates of the 1930s, major players being Brecht, Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno.
4. Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, (O Books, 2009), 47.
5. Ibid, 49.
6. Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design – Architects, where is your Vortex? (The Egoist, 1919), 29.

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