Militant Modernism is a defense against modernism’s many detractors. It looks at design, film, and architecture – especially, architecture – and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary.
Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar – Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Through Hatherley’s eyes, we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century – lesser lights, too – perhaps, understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain’s brutalist aesthetics, Russian constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to modernism.
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“A call to have the courage to be modern against all the current postmodern pieties of exhaustion and fragmentation, Owen Hatherley’s brilliant reactivation of the utopian impulses of the modernist avant-garde is Brecht meeting Ballard to create the science-fiction of socialism.”
“With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism’s utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world.”
