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.

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.

School's Out! Friday 31 October

19:30 Doors open

20:00 - 21:15 Presentation by Owen Hatherley + Q&A

21:15 - 21:30 Short film, selected by Jord Den Hollander

21:30 - 22:00 Drinks and aftertalk

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Workshop Saturday 01 November 2025

The day after Owen’s lecture you can join him for a masterclass on ‘creative urban writing’, based on his unique method that combines walking, reportage, politics and architectural criticism. The master class will start with an informal conversation with Owen where we will discuss the way he writes, and why. Afterwards we will walk 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 will discuss what we have seen and maybe already come up with some ideas for a short text about one or more of the examples we have seen. Over the next weeks you will be asked to write them up, send them to us and we will organise an online masterclass where Owen and you will discuss the results.

The workshop will start at 11:00 and end around 15:00. The workshop is fully booked.

Programme
11:00 - 12:00 Conversation at Independent School for the city
12:00 - 16:00 Walk around Rotterdam South
15:00 - 16:00 Discussion about observations

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