Prefab pictures: cinema of the tower block with Owen Hatherley

The Klassiki Podcast is back! Welcome to our second season. We’re kicking off with an interview with author Owen Hatherley about the history of the tower block on screen. Owen is an author on architecture, politics, and culture, and the author of many books, including several on the architectural history of eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc.

Initially conceived as a rapid response to the housing crisis afflicting post-war Eastern Europe, the prefab tower block became the iconic building of the socialist states, widely understood in the West as symbolic of the grey monotony of life behind the Iron Curtain. More than three decades after the fall of communism, the tower block remains alternately vilified, fetishised, and downright misunderstood by a whole new generation of onlookers. But of course, for the people who actually inhabited these blocks, things were not quite so black and white.

To get past the clichés and to get to grips with what the tower block actually meant for those who lived, worked, and died there, host Sam Goff sat down with Owen to discuss five films set in and around these mass housing monoliths, from five different directors – including iconic auteurs Béla Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Věra Chytilová – to see how the image of the block changed over time.

Make sure to check out Owen’s books about his journeys through Eastern Europe, Landscapes of Communism and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space.

Listen above or head to your favourite podcast app to subscribe now. The Klassiki Podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Audible, and more.

Intro music by Juliet Merchant.