Get angry with the carry on

摘要

My trouble with Owen Hatherley's excellent if thoroughly miserablist walking tour of Blair's urban Britain in his earlier 'New Ruins' is that it maintained an almost nostalgic, rose-tinted view of the modernist/ brutalist housing experiment of the 60s and 70s, without taking account of the fact that people might not have liked living in them very much. Maybe it's because he was a child of the 80s. Hatherley is nothing if not a prolific writer on socialist architecture - his last tome, 'Landscapes of Communism', a dewy-eyed tour of duty around the former Eastern Bloc, runs to 624 pages. Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book it sure ain't. 'The Ministry of Nostalgia' is both red and little (luckily) - and aims to address accusations of nostalgia head on. It's also, by his own admission, something of a mea culpa. His expertise and championing of socialist architecture, read via the lens of modernist housing and Thatcher's abolition of the generous Parker Morris standards, unwittingly helped make the style eminently marketable again. A surf through property sites like The Modern House proves how the message got absolutely lost in the medium.