The 1975 novel High-Rise depicted an apocalyptic tower that drove its inhabitants insane. As a new film adaptation hits cinemas, we wonder what the author would have made of today’s rash of skyscrapers for the megarich.
First published when the 40-storey concrete towers of the Barbican Centre were being erected on London’s skyline, High-Rise caught the popular imagination at a time when suspicion of top-down postwar city planning was growing. “A hideous warning,” was the quote taken from the Guardian review emblazoned on the book’s cover, suggesting that Ballard’s intention was a damning critique of the inhumane direction modern architecture had taken.
The writer seems to slot neatly into a narrative that begins with Jane Jacobs’s attack on the alienating effect of towers and defence of traditional neighbourhoods, and culminates with Alice Coleman’s 1985 report Utopia on Trial, which framed tower blocks as incubators of crime and antisocial behaviour.
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Forty years on, the book has finally been turned into a film starring Tom Hiddleston. Directed by Ben Wheatley, it is being released at a time when 436 new towers are planned for London and public hostility to tall buildings runs high. Protests have led to plans for a 72-storey skycraper by Shard architect Renzo Piano being withdrawn, while residents rallying beneath the banner of More Light More Power continue to battle towers on Bishopsgate which they claim will “blot out the sky”. Even New Yorkers have had enough, now campaigning against a rash of super-tall residential totem poles topped with $100m penthouses that symbolise the city’s increasing social divide.
It is this social inequality written in glass and steel that drives Ballard’s High-Rise. The story follows the trajectory of a tower block in a new middle-class estate on the edge of London, conceived as a “huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation”, with all daily functions from leisure facilities to a supermarket and school provided across its 40 floors.
The film’s production designer, Mark Tildesley, who also created the post-apocalyptic sets for 28 Days Later, has conjured a stirring structure that riffs on various notable buildings of the period, using a mixture of the interiors of the brutalist Bangor Leisure Centre in Northern Ireland and a lot of CGI. His tower sports the same curved-profile balconies as the Barbican, while the way it steps out at its upper levels like a teetering pile of books recalls the ziggurat of the old Birmingham Library . This precipitous overhang gives it an apt sense of instability, as if the dream might topple at any minute. Sure enough, in a later scene, one resident is seen freefalling to their doom past its beautifully sculpted cliff-face.
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