Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent by Owen Hatherley

Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent by Owen Hatherley

DeTnk Bookshelf

'A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today' Owen Jones

A searching, timely account of the condition of contemporary Europe, told through the landscapes of its cities

Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere.

In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU and outside it.

About the Author
Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, The Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism, The Ministry of Nostalgia and The Chaplin Machine.

purchase a copy

Modern Irish architecture marked by striking ‘cheapness and carelessness’
a review of Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent in the Irish Times

The architecture critic Owen Hatherley is that most English of things, an incurable Europhile. Over the past decade, in books such as Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, he has built for himself a certain embattled vantage: scourge of the speculative dross of contemporary British planning and architecture, defender of what remains from the country’s brief romance with Modernism. (Embattled up to a point, that is: his once scandalous taste for postwar concrete is now widely shared, and coffee-table books about Brutalism may be found in the gift shops of Victorian museums.) An idea of Europe has long functioned as a supporting strut in Hatherley’s thinking: a Europe where rational planning, social optimism and aesthetic daring have prevailed against the UK’s devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to architecture, and to much else. Has this Europe – a Kraftwerkian dream of placid dwelling, super-glide transport and cultural surprises – ever actually existed? While the Brexit farce unfolds, Hatherley slips under the English Channel to find out.

His Europe is not exactly where you would expect to find it. Trans-Europe Express begins with a brief tour of a few major capitals, which tend to irritate or bore the author. Brussels, for example, is a speculative mess, its monuments soaked in the blood of the Congo. Paris is all “white boulevards full of solely white people”. Berlin merits no more than a few pages. Hatherley is more interested in knottier cases, where the main tendencies he identifies in European cities may most starkly be seen, sometimes together: tabula rasa postwar Modernism, tourist-trap preservation and incongruously UK-style commercial free-for-all. As in his previous books, what he seems most to admire is grandeur in raw concrete, a civically minded refusal of both kitschily “iconic” starchitecture and the kind of street-level human-scale regeneration we are all meant to love these days. He finds what he is looking for first in Le Havre, a port with links to his native Southampton – one of the book’s points is that Britain has never been culturally isolate or sovereign – and home to (purportedly) Europe’s largest square. It is hard to think of a more Hatherley-esque image than the little black-and-white photograph he gives us of the 1958 Hôtel de Ville and empty environs.

continue reading at irishtimes.com




Back

 


search

 

 


Archives

September 2020 (2)
August 2020 (1)
July 2020 (1)
June 2020 (1)
May 2020 (2)
February 2020 (1)
October 2019 (1)
September 2019 (2)
July 2019 (1)
June 2019 (1)
May 2019 (1)
April 2019 (2)
March 2019 (4)
December 2018 (2)
November 2018 (4)
October 2018 (4)
September 2018 (8)
August 2018 (7)
July 2018 (11)
June 2018 (11)
May 2018 (13)
April 2018 (11)
March 2018 (12)
February 2018 (13)
January 2018 (18)
December 2017 (8)
November 2017 (15)
October 2017 (17)
September 2017 (14)
August 2017 (18)
July 2017 (10)
June 2017 (12)
May 2017 (12)
April 2017 (15)
March 2017 (15)
February 2017 (22)
January 2017 (13)
December 2016 (9)
November 2016 (14)
October 2016 (11)
September 2016 (19)
August 2016 (13)
July 2016 (11)
June 2016 (16)
May 2016 (19)
April 2016 (17)
March 2016 (9)
February 2016 (15)
January 2016 (14)
December 2015 (7)
November 2015 (15)
October 2015 (12)
September 2015 (5)
August 2015 (12)
July 2015 (16)
June 2015 (9)
May 2015 (15)
April 2015 (11)
March 2015 (16)
February 2015 (14)
January 2015 (14)
December 2014 (13)
November 2014 (15)
October 2014 (18)
September 2014 (14)
August 2014 (10)
July 2014 (14)
June 2014 (13)
May 2014 (22)
April 2014 (12)
March 2014 (12)
February 2014 (16)
January 2014 (19)
December 2013 (8)
November 2013 (33)
October 2013 (17)
September 2013 (20)
August 2013 (15)
July 2013 (6)
June 2013 (14)
May 2013 (17)
April 2013 (17)
March 2013 (16)
February 2013 (14)
January 2013 (16)
December 2012 (8)
November 2012 (20)
October 2012 (22)
September 2012 (17)
August 2012 (17)
July 2012 (22)
June 2012 (13)
May 2012 (20)
April 2012 (16)
March 2012 (28)
February 2012 (15)
January 2012 (17)
December 2011 (17)
November 2011 (24)
October 2011 (14)
September 2011 (21)
August 2011 (20)
July 2011 (21)
June 2011 (22)
May 2011 (18)
April 2011 (22)
March 2011 (18)
February 2011 (20)
January 2011 (37)
December 2010 (40)
November 2010 (41)
October 2010 (31)
September 2010 (45)
August 2010 (22)
July 2010 (24)
June 2010 (51)
May 2010 (69)
April 2010 (42)
March 2010 (60)
February 2010 (39)
January 2010 (39)
December 2009 (52)
November 2009 (38)
October 2009 (64)
September 2009 (66)
August 2009 (46)
July 2009 (54)
June 2009 (55)
May 2009 (60)
April 2009 (53)
March 2009 (64)
February 2009 (52)
January 2009 (58)
December 2008 (51)
November 2008 (43)
October 2008 (72)
September 2008 (86)
August 2008 (46)
July 2008 (74)
June 2008 (67)
May 2008 (63)
April 2008 (25)
March 2008 (21)