Rip It Up Lecture #2: The new ruins of Great Britain

Owen Hatherly's lecture was revealing, enjoyable and provocative. I enjoyed his content and his presentation; both were straightforward. Owen has none of the pretentions that people often pick up from the competitive nature of architecture school, and I enjoyed the way he set his investigations a clear political backdrop. He rigourously deconstructed New Labour's approach to regeneration, and correctly identified that the last government did nothing to correct the mistakes of Thatcherism. He identified numerous failed urban projects and the policies, governance and systems that brought about these failures, such as Pathfinder and PPP. I felt that the most interesting moment, was towards the end when the problem of responsibility was debated. Owen's repetetive and unfavourable mention of BDP during his presentation suggested that in recent times, the Architect has frequently been complicit in the systematic 'mugging' of the working classes, by which I mean the degeneration of post-war counsel estates and the acres of replacement private residential flats that have replaced them, up and down the country. As you might expect, architects in the audience where keen to shrug off any implied responsibility. This attitude highlighted the fact that all too frequently, Architects fail to question the projects they take on, listening instead to the 'any work is good work' doctrine. This was evident during the Diploma market day too, when unit masters presented a variety of briefs that responded to, but did not question the current conditions we find ourselves in, such as the supposed need for nuclear power, and the introduction of free schools, where the validity of these programmes was not up for discussion. So I found it really refreshing to see this debate happen in front of hundreds of people. It's the first time I've seen architect and architecture students alike, publicly consider what their role is in society, to question the system in which they function, think about what political position they are endorsing by designing certain projects and what relationship they have to the governance that initiates much of their work in the first place. Two thumbs up.