A Filmic Adaption of Ballard's High-Rise Is a Visceral Complement to a Dystopian Vision
This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as ?Dystopia in the Sky."
The Brutalist high-rises in Ben Wheatley?s new film were inspired in part by Ernö Goldfinger?s Trellick and Balfron towers in London. Image Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as ?Dystopia in the Sky."For architects, if I may generalize an entire professional community, there are few novelists as cultishly beloved as J.G. Ballard. Borges or Calvino have their fair share of admirers, but to borrow an adjective more frequently applied to buildings, Ballard is the most iconic of literary figures?especially for readers of a concrete-expansion-joint persuasion. Witnessing war as a child, training in medicine, and thereafter writing from a rather bloodless middle-class patch of suburbia, Ballard spun tales of urban life that continue to be uncomfortably visceral.
The luxury complex, worked out by the fictional architect Anthony Royal, is configured like a hand, with each tower endowed with a finger-shaped massing. Image © Michael Eaton
High-Rise was published in 1975, against the backdrop of a Britain stumbling into economic crisis. Ballard?s chilling prose won?t be re-created here, but in considering the new film adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley, the original context is worth revisiting. High-Rise was published after the luster of postwar reconstruction and the welfare state had faded: Any re...
The Brutalist high-rises in Ben Wheatley?s new film were inspired in part by Ernö Goldfinger?s Trellick and Balfron towers in London. Image Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as ?Dystopia in the Sky."For architects, if I may generalize an entire professional community, there are few novelists as cultishly beloved as J.G. Ballard. Borges or Calvino have their fair share of admirers, but to borrow an adjective more frequently applied to buildings, Ballard is the most iconic of literary figures?especially for readers of a concrete-expansion-joint persuasion. Witnessing war as a child, training in medicine, and thereafter writing from a rather bloodless middle-class patch of suburbia, Ballard spun tales of urban life that continue to be uncomfortably visceral.
The luxury complex, worked out by the fictional architect Anthony Royal, is configured like a hand, with each tower endowed with a finger-shaped massing. Image © Michael Eaton
High-Rise was published in 1975, against the backdrop of a Britain stumbling into economic crisis. Ballard?s chilling prose won?t be re-created here, but in considering the new film adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley, the original context is worth revisiting. High-Rise was published after the luster of postwar reconstruction and the welfare state had faded: Any re...
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Villa M by Pierattelli Architetture Modernizes 1950s Florence Estate
31-10-2024 07:22 - (
Architecture )
