Modern Ruins with Owen Hatherley and Patrick Keiller
£12, £11 concessions, £10 members
Patrick Keiller is best known for his film essays, London, Robinson in Space and last year’s Robinson in Ruins. Informed by Keiller's background in fine art and architecture, the films address political, economic and cultural questions by undertaking explorations of landscape, with long, lingering takes of urban, rural and other, in-between spaces and wry, semi-fictional narration, written to accompany these characteristic images.
Writer Owen Hatherley has written on architecture, his love of modernism and the loss of socialist ambition in modern town planning and building. His new book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso 2010) highlights the legacy left by New Labour where bright and shiny urban regeneration projects built in areas of urban decay and often to poor standards has meant many have been left empty and tatty looking only a few years after being built. Keiller’s most recent film Robinson in Ruins (2010) is an exploration of landscapes in southern England during 2008, in search of the historical origins of economic and ecological crisis.
Join Patrick and Owen as they discuss what they think urban regeneration has meant in the past few decades and their views on the future of our towns and cities under the current government and beyond.