Owen Hatherley (Southampton, 1981) is a British writer and journalist who lives in London. He blogs mainly about architecture, urbanism, politics, culture and design. He regularly writes for Icon, The Guardian, Frieze, and has a column in the magazine Building Design. Recently he completed his Ph.D. thesis on Americanism in the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union, at Birkbeck College. He is the author of two highly acclaimed books: Militant Modernism and A Guide to the new ruins of Great Britain. Militant Modernism was published three years ago, with the Guardian newspaper declaring it "an intelligent and passionately argued attempt to "excavate utopia" from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism". In the book, Hatherley, with characteristically provocative nostalgia, describes a world that was created before he was born, whose meaning has been forgotten and the sense of it desecrated. In A Guide to the new ruins of Great Britain Hatherley criticized soulless and failed projects, which he claims characterize "a period of greed and depletion" in the Blair-era UK.