Harnessing the Dystopian Dread of the Brutalist Tower Block
The real-life British buildings behind J.G. Ballard’s harrowing “High-Rise.”
Housing in postwar Britain was anything but romantic. The necessity of building, and quickly, shelter to replace the 100,000 houses destroyed by the Blitz in London alone, meant there was little room for romance. Coming to England as a teenager in 1946, after having been raised in the Shanghai International Settlement and spending two years in a Japanese internment camp, novelist J.G. Ballard described it as “a terribly shabby place.” It was, he said, “locked into the past and absolutely exhausted by the war.”
In 1975, Ballard published a novel that focused on these London developments, marrying consumerist ideals of luxury housing with the social problems caused by crowded urban environments. High-Rise begins with 2,000 hopeful residents entering a 40-story apartment tower with smooth, modern design and high-end conveniences, feeling that they have bought into a life of domestic ease. However, the novel ends with the dwellings, halls, shops, and corridors being devastated by a brutalism that has less to do with architectural design than with the human malevolence it has somehow inspired.
The flats in Ballard’s dystopia are occupied not by social-housing tenants, as in the tower blocks that were dotted around London and other U.K. cities by this time, but by “professionals,” who are nonetheless grouped by of wealth. The lower nine floors are “home to the ‘proletariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses and the like,” while the middle section, up to the 35th floor, is made up of “docile members of the professions—doctors, and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists.” The top five floors contain “the discreet oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs, television actresses and careerist academics.” This last group has access to the high-speed lifts, carpeted stairs and “superior services.” It is not difficult to foretell how grievances might erupt in a building that is seen by its residents as both “a hanging paradise” and a “glorified tenement.”
Robert Laing, a physiology lecturer, is one of the main protagonists of the story, and has his first hostile encounter involving a dispute over the shared rubbish chute. As he negotiates the social strata of the building, he soon realizes that “people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them.” Glitches in the building’s electricity supply and malfunctions in some of the lifts servicing the lower floors ignite an internal class war. Unpleasant confrontations in the public spaces rapidly escalate into physical violence. Like most of the residents, Laing becomes drawn in, rather than repelled, by the growing depravity as tenants raid each other’s apartments and are reduced to the “three obsessions” of security, food, and sex. Ballard describes clashes taken to surreal extremes, arguing that the building itself demanded this behavior, being “an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.” The relentless narrative catalogues scene after scene of primal beings battling through apartments that have been torn apart and barricaded, where mounds of rubbish line every space, and where domestic animals are killed for food.
Although Ballard never made direct comparisons between the novel and the Brutalist towers that were going up during the time he was writing, those buildings certainly can be seen as structures that are better off with “man’s absence.” As pristine edifices they can appear pleasingly sculptural, but are less so when their balconies are dotted with the detritus of everyday life, and further degraded by poor maintenance, graffiti, and general neglect. Ballard’s environments of uniform luxury become dehumanizing, but rather than engendering mindless conformity, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, they result in “the regression of middle-class professionals into a state of barbarism.”
The novel is often associated with Trellick Tower, a Brutalist 31-story block in Kensington designed by architect Ernő Goldfinger, which by the time Ballard was writing High-Rise had had a series of problems and a lot of bad press. Even before its opening, there were crises, both in its own construction and in other projects. In 1968, a fire in the Ronan Point tower block in London caused most of the 23 floors to collapse and the deaths of three people. The disaster fueled popular agitation against tower blocks, so that by the time Trellick Tower was completed in 1972, it seemed doomed to fail. The “drying rooms” that Goldfinger had designed in the ground-floor amenities block were vandalized before they were finished. These rooms were his attempt to convince the tenants not to air their laundry on the balconies (and so ruin the appearance of the tower), but they never functioned properly. Just before Christmas 1972, a fire hydrant on the 12th floor was tampered with, causing flooding through the elevator shafts, which meant that the block had no water, heat, or electricity during the holidays. The tower became so firmly linked with crime and social decay that some council-housing tenants lobbied not to be housed there. (It should be noted that at least some of Goldfinger’s assumptions were correct: In the 21st century, improvements in maintenance and security have made the Trellick Tower a desirable address.)
Another immediate provocation for the high-rise setting of the book probably came from the development of the London Docklands at about the time that Ballard was writing. Developers were attempting a regeneration of land among the old warehouses and abandoned shipping yards of a long-desolate waterfront district by introducing a scheme of high-rise towers for office and residential use. The first tower in this development was finished in the 1980s, but plans had already been underway for ambitious building projects in the disused ports since the early 1970s. Ballard specifically sites his fictional tower in a square mile “of abandoned dockland and ware-housing” in London, so the Docklands development provides some ambient background. But Ballard seems particularly keen to demonstrate that the luxury high-rise is as prone to criminality as its less fortunate relations in subsidized estates. In fact, the professional classes in the world of Ballard’s imagining become more deviant, relishing their descent into inhumanity as more buildings are finished and occupied around them. The five towers in the fictional development overlook an ornamental lake, which remains an empty concrete basin (a sign of promise unfulfilled), while the tenants of the first tower fall into savagery reminiscent of the adolescent boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, an equally disturbing fable of human depravity.
Ballard’s more extreme scenarios may be in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, but his underlying assertion that the vertical container for living could have a serious social and psychological impact are not so easily dismissed. His decision to focus on a luxury high-rise inhabited by the educated and the wealthy, rather than on the typical tower blocks built for social housing, was perhaps to make the point clearly that it was the design of the building, not the class of the residents, that brought about such a hellish downward spiral of human behavior. It is a telling irony that in Ballard’s technologically advanced high-rise, warfare is ignited largely by an everyday facilities failure: the breakdown of the lifts.