"Massive, horrible and unavoidable"
Opinion: when the Tour Montparnasse was built in Paris, its residents were so appalled they banned all high-rises. Londoners should do something similar in the wake of Rafael Viñoly's walkie talkie, says Owen Hatherley. More
"Postmodernism will not be forgiven lightly for what it did to architectural culture"
Pomo summer: Postmodernism is still shaping contemporary architecture, says Owen Hatherley, but its impact on social housing is an unforgivable legacy. More
"The real problem with all this Fun is that it isn't really very funny"
Opinion: twisting slides, a hotel room shaped like a boat and a pop-up theatre are among the "fun" recent additions to London's Brutalist Southbank Centre. Has Owen Hatherley lost his sense of humour or is there something more sinister in all these layers of entertainment? More
"This spectacle of power was an inversion of the socialist city"
Opinion: Stalinist Russia turned its military parades into architecture, creating a peculiar form of pomp that still resonates in modern Moscow and emphasises the city's inequalities, finds Owen Hatherley. More
"Modern architecture needs projects like this"
Opinion: you don't have to like Thom Mayne's skyscraper for Vals to understand that architecture needs fantastical projects like it, says Owen Hatherley. More
"The places people are staking their lives on now aren't architectural icons"
Opinion: the fight for London's Aylesbury estate – a negative symbol of the Modernist-inspired drive to standardise housing design – is about saving the ideas not the architecture, explains Owen Hatherley. More
"More frightening than American Psycho"
Opinion: the visual style associated with cinema's super-villains has been transformed into a marketable asset for house builders, says Owen Hatherley. More
"The project of education-via-marketisation has had ugly results"
Opinion: the Brutalist architecture of 1960s British university campuses may not have been popular among students at the time, but recent styles of education architecture suggest a far more cynical approach, says Owen Hatherley. More
"It's no surprise that the government were reluctant to let members of the public in"
Opinion: an unloved relic of 1950s socialist Yugoslavia is one of the finest buildings of its era. But in modern Serbia, its overtly political message doesn't chime well with the prevailing ideology, says Owen Hatherley. More
"So spectacularly ill-judged that you almost long for Libeskind's earnestness"
Opinion: the refurbishment of London's Imperial War Museum by Norman Foster is a "botched" job, but it's hardly surprising given the UK's strange attitude to its own history, says Owen Hatherley. More
"What might the future of Scottish architecture be in an independent state?"
Opinion: Scotland once boasted its own distinct regional building styles, but since devolution began in the 1990s Scottish architecture has fallen foul of the profit-chasing short-termism that has blighted the rest of the UK, says Owen Hatherley. More
"London's new typology: the tasteful modernist non-dom investment"
Opinion: sober, well-mannered and increasingly well made – London's new housing developments are hiding their yuppie-dom behind a polite facade of brickwork that wouldn't look out of place in the 1960s, says Owen Hatherley. More
"What is it exactly we're protesting about?"
Opinion: it's easy to criticise the Design Museum for awarding Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Centre the Design of the Year prize, but there are plenty of other celebrated projects that should be attracting the same scrutiny, says Owen Hatherley. More