Tag Owen Hatherley

Vilnius: brutalism with a human face

In his latest LRB review, Owen Hatherley writes about Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture by Nicolas Grospierre: Grospierre puts next to each other the Vilnius House of Ritual Services (a Soviet type sometimes known as a ‘Sorrow Palace’, where funerals were…

INION

Some brutalist architecture is great – but when it’s bad, it can be very, very ugly, depressing and miserable. Sometimes it ages disgustingly, especially if the concrete is of poor quality. And if there’s a fire… Look at what happened to…

The fatal trapezes

In his grotesque sci-fi novelette The Fatal Eggs (1923), Mikhail Bulgakov wrote of …the theater of the late Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died, as everybody knows, in 1927, during the staging of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when a platform [lit. trapezes] with naked…

Owen Hatherley on Cheryomushki

I would recommend Owen Hatherley’s well-researched piece on Moscow’s residential districts (not quite suburbs) to anyone interested in post-Soviet urban life and urban planning in general. I suggest that readers also browse the photos in the author’s Flickr albums, some linked…