Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape.

Somehow the high-rise played into the hands of the most petty impulses.

The high-rises seemed almost to challenge the sun itself.Ĭhapter 2 Within half an hour almost all of the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.

'It's almost as if these aren't the people who really live here'.

In the early hours of the morning the two thousand tenants subsided below a silent tide of Seconal.

At parties people discussed their insomnia in the same way they referred to the other built-in design flaws of the building. All the residents he had met, upon learning he was a physician, at some point brought up their difficulties in sleeping. The internal time of the high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia.At times he felt that were all waiting for someone to make a serious mistake.The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.

At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project - an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.In 2015 it was adapted into a film directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller and Jeremy Irons Ballard about a London tower block whose affluent residents, after all the apartments are rented, gradually descend into barbarism, vandalizing the building and remaining in it all day and forming groups to violently attack other floors and defend their own.

The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard