Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism. United Kingdom. Zero Books, 2009. 160 pp. £9.95.
A brutalist romp with a brain, Militant Modernism invokes early 1920s Russia and post-war Britain as nascent utopias. Written in a lively style, Owen Hatherley’s debut monograph bounces ideas off and nails them to the rough concrete walls of the many now desolate-looking destinations celebrated here at length. Starting out from his native Southampton, Hatherley blends sci-fi, Soviet sexualities, Brechtian alienation, local authorities and troublesome locales on both sides of the erstwhile Iron Curtain to put the case for an experimental social engineering, far removed from the domesticated modernism beloved of reputable European aesthetes. It’s not every day you read a subchapter devoted to ‘Wyndham Lewis as chav’. Underscored by a virtual soundtrack of references to post-punk industrial pop music and all the better for this energetic tone, Militant Modernism collides shades of Slavoj Žižek with Barrett Watten’s poetic treatment of Detroit techno in The Constructivist Moment (2003).
Behind the showmanship, there are some serious points to be made. Twee, nostalgic reasons for hating tower blocks and arguments for subsuming these brutalist buildings under the quotidian functions of the heritage and regeneration industries are at a stand-off. Hatherley rejects the two sides of this stalemate, wishing a plague on both their (council?) houses. On the contrary, he praises gigantic functionalist grey concrete structures as an expression of the idea that nothing is too good for working class people, who each deserve a proletarian Eldorado to live in. In contrast to today’s ASBO-mongering, estate-bashing pundits, here is an author seeking to disentangle unforeseen consequences of epic social housing provision from its ambitious underlying principles. (Unfortunately he sidesteps any real discussion of the jerry-built failings of existing public housing; if the notion of the sink estate is ideological, bad planning and cheap materials lend it physical credence.)
Back before bashing Dubai’s architecture became widespread among journalists, correspondents would heap opprobrium on the stark tower block. Thamesmead Estate, Robin Hood Gardens and other such fabrications are often portrayed as being in some way ‘Stalinist’, but Hatherley ridicules this cliché by revisiting those structures that were newly built in Twenties Russia, including some that never got off the drawing board but whose architectural plans survive. He treats these buildings - and their counterparts in post-war Britain - as intrinsically challenging to bourgeois notions of good taste. Not only did they turn H.G. Wells’ vision of Martian transportation into places of residence, they also supplied or at least proposed a built environment which could adapt instantly to communal living, divorce on demand and polyamorous relationships, by rearranging the interior walls and mixing up public and private spaces. By praising the constructivists and productivists of the early to mid-1920s - including the Tecton group under Berthold Lubetkin - the author enthuses over attempts to eroticise everyday life using public space. This engagement of municipal housing in revolutionary ‘sexpol’ was far from Stalinist; such proposals and the developments they inspired met with state disapproval in the more prudish Stalin era, especially after the Palace of the Soviets architectural competition of 1933 crowned a conservative style for official buildings.
Bucking orthodoxy, Hatherley claims that harshness can be used as an aesthetic weapon in the struggle to transform everyday life. This outlook is presented as being reinforced by Brechtian theatre, avant-garde cinema and other commentaries on experimental sexual relationships, coalescing in a revolutionary subculture. Indeed, Militant Modernism seems designed to provoke, by putting a tick next to each aspect of brutalism for which Prince Charles or the heritage industry would add a cross. Despite the playful tone, the author never stops posing the key question of whether residents actually like, or would fight to defend, their much-maligned, formerly futuristic abodes.
Is this a monograph or manifesto? By the time the staccato
conclusion is berating the suburban leanings of George Orwell, one
wonders. Is Hatherley recycling the rubble of failed political
movements? Has it escaped him that in Gordon Brown’s Britain, estates
are re-engineered to erase anti-social behaviour? Not so much creating
a New Public Man, as stopping the old order from falling apart
(although not its buildings, significantly). Such reservation aside,
Militant Modernism deserves a wide readership because it shovels
today’s narrow view of social housing into the swirling concrete mixer
of public engagement.
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