Ever since I was asked to review his book ‘Landscapes of Communism’ in 2015, Owen Hatherley has been one of my favourite authors. I have read most of his books – from ‘Militant Modernism’ (described by The Guardian as an "intelligent and passionately argued attempt to excavate Utopia”) to ‘Red Metropolis’ and the less well known ‘Across the Plaza: The Public Voids of the Soviet City’. ‘Trans-Europe Express’, his comprehensive and witty guide to European architecture, has been my faithful travel companion on a number of trips.
These days, as I find myself in the middle of researching a book on the Utopian settlements of Britain, some of Hatherley’s works are proving helpful, eye-opening and simply indispensable and are likely to be among my own book’s most quoted sources.
The scope of Hatherley’s architectural interests has always been astonishing – from the Bauhaus quarter of Tel Aviv to the monstrous bulk of my own alma mater, the University of...