“CUMBERNAULD’S notorious town centre to be demolished and replaced,” the headline on Herald Scotland ran last month. North Lanarkshire Council had agreed a deal in principle to purchase the centre from its private owners, with plans for a major regeneration.

If it goes ahead, it will bring an end to Geoffrey Copcutt’s design, hailed as an architectural marvel when it was built in 1967.

The reputation of modernist and brutalist architecture in the UK is, undoubtedly, a contested one. It is not short of detractors. So, one of the pleasures of Owen Hatherley’s new book, Modern Buildings in Britain A Gazetteer, is to hear the other side of the argument.

Hatherley is a passionate defender of modernist architecture, both as an idea and in its concrete form. But he is not blind to its failings. His book is a 600-page catalogue of the best and worst of 20th-century buildings.

“I want this to be a book that doesn’t offer modern architecture as an escape, as a pretty pipe dream, but as an experience, one which is both ordinary and extraordinary,” he writes in his introduction.

The Scottish section of the book takes in football stands, factories, churches, universities and bridges. He raves about the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh (“Edinburgh’s finest modernist building”) and is dismissive of Zaha Hadid’s Transport Museum (“back-of-an-envelope-scribble-shed). The result is a book that will get you excited about architecture.

Hatherley is an opinionated, acerbic and, most importantly, informed architecture critic, who is not afraid to deliver bad news, as you can see here in this extract in which he offers his own take on Cumbernauld town centre:

“A terrible mistake. The idea was as follows: the town centre would consist of a long concrete spine that would have a shopping mall, a bus station, some housing, and whatever else its users and owners fancied inserted into it or removed from it at will in the manner imagined by the Metabolist movement of architects in Japan, who imagined buildings as constantly growing and morphing organisms, a much-discussed image of adaptability.

“Well, it did get adapted, by shopping mall developers who didn’t care much for Copcutt’s sculptural Brutalism, and so they inserted various kinds of tat into it before they decided to eat away at the original building, until all that was left was a tatty and gaunt fragment, with the rather optimistic penthouses uninhabited.

“Cumbernauld is full of good things and good ideas, but its most famous building is not among them. However, in the remnant that exists, with its pile-up of industrial forms, like a gantry crane and containers cast for ever in immovable concrete, you can see both the seduction of the Metabolist idea – the city as a gigantic self-renewing machine – and its disastrous reality when applied to a bluff capitalist reality, where aesthetics and Tesco Extra pull in opposite directions.”

The Herald:

Modern Buildings in Britain A Gazetteer by Owen Hatherley is published on Thursday by Particular Books, £60