A Short History of the Refusal of Work as a Revolutionary Strategy

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilisation holds sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two...

Manufacturing a Past in London’s ‘Regeneration’ Heritage has, for some time, been a pivotal part of the process of gentrification. A kind of Fred Dibnah nostalgia for long-decommissioned industry, combined with a revulsion for 1960s style comprehensive development, has meant that factories and...

The Fall, the Factory and the Disciplined Worker, 1978-83

Two Types of Factory

Over the last few years two distinct and conflicting ideas about The Fall and their ethos have become...

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery. What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?...

Politics of building, aesthetics of anti-architecture hannes meyer & hans wittwer, basel peterschule Functionalism is a vexed term. Denounced, claimed to be impossible, or a pejorative for the ‘merely functional’. Yet for much of the 20th century functionalism was, almost inadvertently...

Sartorial Socialism from Huey P Newton to Honecker Little has happened since 1989 to challenge the view that aesthetically, ‘actually existing socialism’ was one enormous bread queue, its dowdily dressed denizens no doubt dourly shivering in front of a grey concrete building housing a state...

Architecture or Revolution: the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne, 1928-33 Ribbon City Proposal for Magnitogorsk, Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, 1930 (Some of this might be familiar from the garden cities piece: this is a paper given at the Building Centre on 19/5/07) Perhaps the key...

A history of Vermilion Sands ‘A Place where I would be happy to live’ There are many agglomerations of people in the works of JG Ballard that could, at a stretch, be called ‘communities’ – the linear city on the French Riviera that provides the setting for...

Garden Cities of To-morrow and Garden Suburbs of Yesterday It might seem peculiar to imagine the New Towns or Garden Cities as anything especially revolutionary: places like Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage or Hampstead Garden Suburb are assumed to be staid and dull, their radical...