In talking about the content of Militant Modernism Owen Hatherley says in this interview at the Ready Steady Book literary site that this modernism has a dialectic there between science and romanticism which should never be entirely resolved.

I regard this tension, or contradiction, perhaps, as one of the things that makes Modernism interesting – the friction between the allegedly romantic or idealistic notion that we could live differently, and the attempt to achieve this via scientific, technological means.....We also need, and could undergo, a fourth industrial revolution to convert a dead-end economy based on fossil fuels and rapacious growth to less destructive energies and technologies. This would be a huge Modernist project, easily the equal of the earlier technological revolutions but without making the same mistakes, with a vast potential for the creation of new forms or new and better ways of living. I think most of this would be popular, far more now than at any time for decades.

Interesting idea.

Karl Whitney in this review of Militant Modernism says

The book is most persuasive in its survey of Left Modernism’s interventions in the urban environment. Hatherley begins his investigations among the Brutalist concrete tower-blocks that mark his home city of Southampton – the autobiographical impulse behind his book at times makes it a companion work to Lynsey Hanley’s Estates. These largely dilapidated and neglected buildings are to the writer the remnants of a grand post-war cultural experiment which he views as a mutual contract between the British government and people – an agreement that both parties entered into gladly.

Hatherley sees the seemingly irreducible alienness of Brutalist architecture as hastening a critical process that overturns our habitual everyday routines to reveals the problems of everyday life.

Melbourne's brutalist high rise inner city urban apartments---Australia's example of the progressive politics of ‘Left Modernism’--- was popularly rejected as bad housing.

. . . was a member of Fluxus? Did he drop out, because Fluxus still exists - go here:
fluxlist@yahoogroups.com

Mal,
dunno why Kirkeby left Fluxus--maybe the Danish wing of that art movement faded?