Owen Hatherley: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Brutalist Fandom

Post-war architecture, and brutalist architecture in particular, has probably never been as popular as it is now, at least not since the time it was originally built. Despite certain lingering animosities, guided walks are taking place around the world from Hong Kong to Uzbekistan, Brazil, Ukraine, and Britain, photobooks and films are being published, and a plethora of consumer items such as mugs, maps, and models are being produced that commemorate and celebrate buildings from the 1950s to the 1970s. At the same time, however, the socialist values that these buildings so often embodied, both in Eastern and Western Europe and globally, have never been less present in public life or in new construction projects. Using examples particularly from the United Kingdom, this lecture will ask what happens when post-war buildings are successfully "conserved" and "saved" from demolition in a completely different context of neoliberal capitalism. Has the ethics of brutalist buildings been discarded while their aesthetics have been celebrated? And are there better examples of preserving architecture and the values of post-war buildings?

Owen Hatherley is a London-based writer who writes about aesthetics and politics among others for Architectural Review, The Guardian, and London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, the most recent being Modern Buildings in Britain: a Gazetteer (Penguin, 2022); Artificial Islands (Repeater, 2022), which won awards for Best Book and Best Monograph at the Architectural Book Awards 2023; and Transitional Objects (The Modernist, 2023). He serves as an editor at the publishing house Jacobin. His first book, Militant Modernism (2009), was translated into Czech in 2021.