Owen Hatherley (born 1981) is a journalist and academic based in London. He writes on political aesthetics for Building Design, Icon, Frieze, the Guardian and others, and is the author of Militant Modernism (Zero Books 2009) and the forthcoming A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010).

Project: An empty Space Creates a Richly Filled Time

'I will be talking about the use of empty spaces and gigantic plazas in modernist town planning. It will be argued that, despite their rationalist or cynical reasoning - whether for troop movements and parades, for efficient circulation or simply as well-meaning but unused public spaces - the windswept plazas of the Kulturforum, Alexanderplatz and innumerable others create an uncanny environment, an incursion of the steppe into the metropolis, that owes as much to Giorgio de Chirico as to Ludwig Hilberseimer.'