Militant Modernist: Owen Hatherley
The reason why I mention ‘urban music’ is because it is Modernism. It is. Modernism might have died off in architecture sometime in the 70s, with a few ghostly manifestations ever since, but I don’t think there’s anything remotely postmodernist, in the sense of forms which merely rejig the past, about Detroit techno, about most hip hop, about the continuum of jungle, 2 step and grime. Indie is postmodernist. But the musics I mention above all give you that sense of futurist exhilaration, present new forms and new noises, different ways of perceiving space and the environment around you, and open up a democratisation of creation and production that the ‘productivists’ of the ’20s, who wanted every worker to become an artist and vice versa, would have been delighted with.
Andrew Stevens hears an impassioned defence of modernism from reluctant critic Owen Hatherley.
This Could Be
Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest and oldest ports, it is a working, modernist’s multicultural vision, threaded with canals, and criss-crossed by bridges that look like swans. It is Amsterdam minus tourists, with its heart bombed out by the Germans on May 14th, and still commemorated. Never forget the bombing raids that stripe and cross the city. Ever since 1940, the city’s been filling those gaps with glassy sleek, weirdly balanced, imaginative skyscrapers that defy Newton’s Law of Gravity. Some are very odd.
Sophie Parkin swaps De Hems in Soho for the real thing when she ups sticks to Rotterdam.