High-Rise: the brutal truth

By Joe Lloyd

Dr Robert Laing sits on his balcony, nonchalantly eating the hindquarters of a dog. The opening scene of J.G. Ballard’s novel, “High-Rise’, now adapted for screen by Ben Wheatley, is one of the most arresting in 20th-century fiction. Foul as it may be, Laing’s feast is a treat considering what he has endured up to this point. In the space of a few months, the 40-storey city-in-the-sky he calls home has descended from bourgeois luxury into barbarism, caused not by any external pressures but by the thrusting concrete tower itself, which slowly exerts its psychological imprint on its isolated residents. One resident describes the building as a “huge animate presence”, surveying its inhabits like a panoptic prison. Part satire, part prophecy, the novel offers a terrifying vision of progress-turned-regress.

While high-rise buildings are found throughout history – from medieval Arabian mudbrick dwellings to early 20th-century steel-frame skyscrapers – the form has become particularly associated with the architectural style known as brutalism. By the time Ballard’s novel was published in 1975, “high-rise” had come to denote buildings made from reinforced concrete, consisting of many similar-size flats stacked together. Brutalist architects practised their work with a utopian fervour, believing buildings could fundamentally change people’s way of life, transforming society in the process.