There was something uncanny about Charlie Chaplin. His fellow actors spoke of him as inhuman--automaton-like. His stiff, comic movements could be viewed as an attempt to parody the newly developed production lines of Henry Ford's revolutionary factories. As wide-scale application of this technology spread to Soviet Russia, Chaplin's slapstick comedic style also found a following among the artists carving out a new society under communism.
In The Chaplin Machine, Owen Hatherley unearths the hidden history of Soviet film, art, and architecture. Turning upside down the common view...

Why should we have to "Keep Calm and Carry On"?

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.

The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the...

Owen Hatherley takes us on a transcontinental tour of the cities of the former Soviet Union, discovering what they can teach us about changing our cities for the better.