If you hadn’t heard of Coleg Harlech in Wales, an adult education college whose endangered brutalist structures are “probably the most sheerly convincing 20th-century buildings in the entire country”, don’t worry. You are not alone. And it is precisely because works like this are obscure that Modern Buildings in Britain had to be written. For one of its strengths is the devotion and persistence with which Owen Hatherley has sought out gems across the country: a radar station in Fleetwood, an experimental plastic classroom in Preston, the magical Pannier Market in Plymouth, the modest 1950s Edgbaston offices of the Engineering & Allied Employers’ Federation.
These take their place alongside more famous works – the National Theatre and the Lloyd’s building in London, the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh – in a century-plus sweep that goes back to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, built from 1897 to 1909, and extends to recent designs by 6a Architects, Amin Taha and Assemble. What emerges from this 600-page breeze block of book is a sense of colossal achievement, by the many architects and builders who made such a diverse, inventive and powerful array of buildings. It demonstrates that modern architecture in Britain, often controversial and demonised, is a substantial, irremovable and remarkable part of the national story.
A baggy definition of “modern” is required. It’s easier to say what’s out – the reheated classicism of Quinlan Terry, almost everything by the late-imperial maestro Edwin Lutyens – than what should be in. The common factor to the included designs, if there is one, is a sense that modern times create conditions and freedoms that engender buildings different from those of the past.
If that’s broad, it’s also generous, taking in Kate Macintosh’s majestic housing for the London borough of Southwark and the “expressionist emotion and kitsch decoration” of Francis Xavier Velarde’s 1936 church of St Monica in Bootle. Hatherley is informed and insightful but also frankly opinionated, with possibly unexpected results. He has a taste for astringent functionality, but also for the colourful postmodern extravagances of FAT’s studios for the BBC in Cardiff and John Outram’s “muscular and cartoonish” Judge Business School in Cambridge.
What attracts him most is evidence of strong minds, of architects who know what they want and go for it. Most strong-minded of all is brutalism – “responsible,” says Hatherley, “for most of the genuine masterpieces of 20th-century architecture in Britain” – the love of which is a driving force behind the book.
Some contradictions are inherent to Hatherley’s project. He says that he wants to describe buildings as lived-in experiences rather than “pure image”, but the format of the gazetteer doesn’t allow him to linger long in any one place. It presents architecture as an array of individual objects, indeed as images, rather than as inhabited places. The ancestry of the genre goes back via the Buildings of England guidebooks of Nikolaus Pevsner to the grand tours of 18th-century English aristocrats. It implies an eye that is detached, touristic, educated, potentially entitled.
This approach generates switchbacks from subjective to objective and back again – between adjectival descriptions (“rigorous”, “ruthless”, “thrilling”, “socially convincing and visually enjoyable”) and scholarly identifications of Scandinavian or constructivist influences. It leads him to categorise each building with a style (“moderne”, “modernist eclectic”, “ecomodernism”) that helps to navigate the multiplicity of looks, but puts projects in boxes where they don’t comfortably belong.
Hatherley also struggles to reconcile his love of modernist architecture with a commitment to socialist politics. Both, as he says, are progressive, but not in ways that are perfectly aligned with each other. Thus Richard Seifert, an enthusiastic agent of property developers’ capitalism such as the Centre Point tower in London, designed modernist buildings that Hatherley admires. Leftwing local authorities, as he acknowledges, have been known to commission unprogressive neo-Georgian.
He’s not wrong, though, to point out that politics and architecture are intertwined, and it’s better to lay out the unresolved questions than ignore them, which is the usual practice of guidebooks and gazetteers. It would be perverse to chronicle modernist architecture in Britain without mentioning, for example, its significance to the schools and council housing of Clement Attlee’s postwar government.
And, in truth, all of us who write about architecture have to find our fallible way through this always vague terrain, where form and content and look and meaning invert and blur. Hatherley, with this phenomenal work of gathering and observation, does it better than most.
• Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer by Owen Hatherley is published by Particular Books (£60). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
