School's Out! #53 with Owen Hatherley

School’s Out! #53 - Owen Hatherley

Every last Friday of the month the Independent School for the City celebrates the start of the weekend with a public lecture. For this edition we've invited writer Owen Hatherley.

Owen Hatherley is a globetrotting journalist and critic, a “velvet gloved provocateur”, according to The Guardian newspaper, who has written about the ruinous architecture of austerity Britain, public housing projects in the USA and the monumental legacies of twentieth century socialism. He combines an unapologetic belief in revolution with an aesthetes eye for the architectural sublime.

His talk will be on writing and walking about the legacies of modern architecture, welfare states and state socialism, based on the speaker's experience working on the subject since the late 2000s. It will explore the questions of how to approach the histories of modern architecture in the context of the political and physical changes since the seventies, whether to emphasise or downplay the connections between architecture and politics, and whether first-person observation is, or isn't, a useful way of exploring and understanding these places and their legacies.

Workshop

The day after Owen’s lecture, we organised a masterclass on ‘creative urban writing’, based on Owen’s unique method that combines walking, reportage, politics and architectural criticism. The master class started with an informal conversation discussing the way Owen writes, and why. Afterwards we walked past a number of twentieth and early twenty first century urban projects, that each are unmistakably a sign of the political times they were built in. After the walk we discussed what we have seen and participants came up with some ideas for a short text about one or more projects we have seen. Over the following weeks they wrote up their ideas and discussed them online with Owen. The texts will be published here.

About Owen Hatherley

Alongside earlier books such as Landscapes of Communism, and Trans-Europe Express, Hatherley’s more recent work—including Walking the Streets / Walking the Projects (2024) and The Alienation Effect (2025)—continues his investigation into the architectural and ideological traces of socialist and social-democratic politics in both Eastern and Western contexts. These works exemplify his method of combining historical analysis with on-the-ground observation, using walking and writing as a way to critically engage with spaces shaped by public ambition, collective memory, and political struggle. Drawing on this extensive body of work, Owen Hatherley brings a unique perspective shaped by years of critical writing, travel, and research across post-socialist Europe, the UK, and the US. His practice of blending architectural analysis with political critique and lived experience will serve as a key lens for this discussion.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, the London Review of Books, Sidecar and Tribune. He is the author of many books, most recently Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater, 2024), and The Alienation Effect – How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2025). He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin, the presenter of the Inter-Cities podcast for Open City, and the writer and presenter of The Story of Solent City for Radio 4.