Owen Hatherley

In November​ 2024, London’s annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated...

Adorno​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia: ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original,...

Scandinavia​ was the exemplar for 20th-century British architecture, the place that designers most wanted to recreate. Britain shared with Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland a superficially similar history of maritime expansion, Protestantism, capitalism, Labourism and – in Denmark’s case – imperialism. And in the postwar years it aspired to the social democratic consensus...

Fassbinder was flamboyantly gay, proudly ugly, extremely left-wing, outrageously productive and had an astonishing eye. It’s easy to imagine him, if he’d lived, being one of those strange boomers who have managed a seamless transition to the new media reality, a Bob Dylan or David Lynch, posting gnomic tweets, putting out brilliant TikToks and hosting a podcast where he plays Schlager music and discusses Sex-pol theory.

My​ father lived in West London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when, on high ground, Battersea power station dominated the skyline. These days he travels regularly along the Southampton-Waterloo line, originally the South Western Railway. Where the line’s depot once stood at Nine Elms, there is a chaos of luxury investment vehicles, towers sprouting in every available space...