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Tag: JG Ballard

The Last London

The London Review of Books has a brilliant, sprawling, melancholy essay by author and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair titled ‘The Last London’. It’s difficult to know what to quote from the essay as it touches on so many interesting, diverse things, but this passage about London in science fiction is perhaps most appropriate for here: 

In 1909 [Ford Madox] Ford published an essay titled ‘The Future in London’, a provocative vision of a planned last city, a London circumscribed by the sixty-mile sweep of a compass point set in Threadneedle Street. He anticipated the urban planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie in reading London as a series of orbital hoops, ring roads and parkland. Brought to life on the edge of the river, this port settlement has always been a magnet for outsiders. It was constructed that way, developed to draw in the scattered tribes, the hut dwellers, to establish the importance of a river crossing. A satellite of Colchester, it was 100 AD before Londinium became a significant entity. And then it was lost, abolished, pulled apart, before it grew again.

Ford Madox Ford’s Edwardian pipedream is ahead of its time. He sees that Oxford and Cambridge and the south coast are all part of the London microclimate. He sees the river coming into its own as an avenue for transport. He envisages escalators and moving pavements, and a population enriched and civilised by incomers. He presents himself as so much the English gentleman that he is doomed to spend most of his career in chaotic exile, in France and the US. Ford is self-condemned, like Wyndham Lewis. His London is as fantastic now as the Magnetic City, protected by river and man-made canals, in Lewis’s The Human Age trilogy: ‘The blank-gated prodigious city was isolated by its riverine moat.’

The compulsion to imagine and describe a final city runs from Richard Jefferies, with his After London; or, Wild England (1885), through Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my own compulsive beating of the bounds, an exploration of neural paths and autopilot drifts through the City into Whitechapel and Mile End. One of these haunted dérives brought me to the window of a bookshop in Brushfield Street, alongside Spitalfields Market. The shop, of course, is gone now and the proprietor dead. I zoomed in on an item with a striking riverside skyline on the dust-jacket: Last Men in London by W. Olaf Stapledon, published in 1932. Here was a more intimate coda to the better-known Last and First Men (1930). I had to carry the book home.

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Brutalist Dreams

At the New York Review of Books, American architecture critic Martin Filler casts a critical eye over a slew of new books on Brutalist architecture: 

In addition to its echoes of art brut—Jean Dubuffet’s name for outsider art—New Brutalism was also an oblique riposte to New Humanism, a set of beliefs inspired by Geoffrey Scott’s hugely influential book ‘The Architecture of Humanism’ (1914). But Scott’s call for a return to Arts and Crafts design principles was scorned as escapist nostalgia by many young midcentury modernists. Among them was the period’s foremost British architecture critic, Reyner Banham, who with his scant empathy for the Arts and Crafts Movement’s focus on social reform issues belittlingly described New Humanism as “brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate)—picturesque detailing without picturesque planning. It was, in fact, the so-called ‘William Morris Revival,’ now happily defunct….”

Yet it was not a utopian nineteenth-century dreamland that Brutalism countered as much as the thin, commercialized version of the International Style that after World War II gained ascendance through economic expediency. Brutalism’s striking departure from the steel-skeleton-and-glass-skin conformity of this routine, profit-oriented modernism was defined by its contrary emphasis on raw concrete (‘béton brut’ in French) in massive forms of imposing scale, idiosyncratic shape, rough finish, and uncompromising forcefulness, with a building’s inner workings and services—structure, plumbing, electricity, heating, and ventilation—unabashedly exposed. Brutalism soon became a worldwide craze, as this comparatively economical means of fabrication offered a cost-effective alternative to hand-riveted metal construction and allowed a broader array of sculptural effects than those obtainable with rectilinear frameworks.

One gets the sense Filler is no fan of Brutalism — at least its bleak British incarnation — so there is, inevitably, a reference to J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise:

This was never a style that attempted to convey warmth, comfort, intimacy, or other qualities we tend to associate with an enjoyable way of life, and thus it never won much love except from architectural specialists. Brutalism posited an unsentimental, not to say harsh, view of the modern world, and however heroic its unflinching embodiment of hard realities may have been, most people do not enjoy a daily diet of architectural anxiety and alienation, especially in northern climates under cloudy skies.

One of the first signs of rejection came in J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel ‘High-Rise (1975), which is set in a thinly fictionalized version of Ernő Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in London’s North Kensington (1966–1972). (It is one of fifty-four sites highlighted in the ‘Brutalist London Map’, a useful guide to landmarks of the style in the British capital.) This thirty-one-story apartment block, commissioned by the Greater London Council, was based on Le Corbusier’s original Unité in Marseilles, although Goldfinger’s scheme is nearly twice as high as its prototype. Trellick Tower was well received by its first inhabitants, but as was also true of contemporaneous public housing projects in the United States, it quickly went to pot as funds for its upkeep and security were slashed, which resulted in a rapid descent into crime and squalor.

Neoconservative critics blamed the architecture, but as sociological studies have since proven, the claim that tall residential complexes breed social malaise is groundless. After Trellick Tower was privatized in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher got the British government out of the public housing business, the building’s owner-residents increased protection from intruders, paid for long-delayed repairs, and it is now a highly desirable property rightly appreciated for its design quality. 

If anyone can point me to a review of these books by someone a little more sympathetic to Brutalism, I’d be much obliged. 

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Working for the Building

high-rise-paint

In a long and fascinating interview with the Ballardian, Ben Wheatley talks about J.G. Ballard and his adaptation of High-Rise:

Initially, I really enjoyed the cult appeal of [Ballard’s] work, or more specifically the counter-cultural aspect. His books, particularly Crash and High-Rise, were like rites of passage for anyone trying to read subversive and counter-cultural literature. Alongside Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, they were books you had to read. But I was especially struck by Ballard’s use of language and turns of phrase, which didn’t feel like any other writer I had come across.

Although I enjoy SF, and that was also part of the charm of his novels, I also think it was books like The Atrocity Exhibition and then his 70s books that really hooked me in. When I was a teenager, there were two writers that really appealed to me: Burroughs and Ballard. They weren’t just authors and novelists in the traditional sense, they seemed much more dangerous and enigmatic than other writers. Burroughs naturally has a mystique because he shot his wife in the head and was a junkie, and therefore the extremity of his fiction was partially mirrored in his real life.

But the thing is, there was something about Ballard that was even stranger and perhaps more insidious, in the sense that he didn’t do those extreme things and was living a quiet, suburban life as a father to three children while also pouring out these amazingly perverse books. That had a big effect on me, but I was also aware of him through music, comics and other media. I wasn’t a particularly voracious reader of novels, so in some ways I experienced Ballard through a kind of cultural response to his work.

This is the best, most in-depth interview with Wheatley I’ve read on the subject of adapting Ballard and making High-Rise.

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A Dirge for a New World

Empire Design
Empire Design

Andrew F. Sullivan, author of ultra-violent urban noir WASTE,1 reviews Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise by J.G. Ballard for TIFF.Net:

Wheatley and Ballard point to a pattern—a dissolution of social order that cannot be prevented by technology or progress. Even the most unnatural setting seems to only drive humanity back to its base needs—food, water, shelter, flesh. The past, the basest parts of being human, carry more weight than any building, any new technological development. Elevators become new traps for the hunters. The supermarket on the seventh floor is one last place to forage. Even the soundtrack reimagines this future past for the audience, Portishead performing ABBA’s pop hit “S.O.S.” as a warning for the residents and viewers alike—a dirge for a new world.

Residents begin to harvest the building itself for what they need and reject the outside world. Wheatley’s design team has mimicked the 70s-era incredibly well, but everything is innovative. The products and designs on the shelves are made specifically for this brave new world. The future is behind us. The high-rise becomes a place unto itself—a slow motion horrorshow.

Much like his previous work, Wheatley refuses to provide a straight narrative for the audience and at times, the film descends into an anarchic blend of images without the rules to bind them—as it should. We scurry past a horse on a rooftop, a gang of TV presenters armed with baseball bats and chair legs, a dog drowned in the pool. Parties turn into rituals, sacrifices, religious ceremonies and then dissolve back into chaos once again. Wheatley’s camera starts out sleek and mannered, transitioning smoothly from one floor to the next. However, once the social order slides, the narrative structure breaks under the strain. Viewers slider from one party to another, the camera following bodies as they rise and fall. The film itself opens with an ending.

 

Edwin Turner has also written about High-Rise at Biblioklept. Ed’s opinion of the movie is less favourable than Andrew’s, but his post also pointed me to Tasha Robinson’s interesting review of the film at The Verge:

There’s a touch of Luis Buñuel’s ‘Exterminating Angel’ in the way everyone in the building seems to be stuck there, isolated from the outside by mutual consent, for no reason anyone cares to address. But Wheatley’s visual style never feels beholden to Buñuel. It’s more familiar from 1960s speculative-fiction films. The Brutalist architecture and cold sterility of the building suggests Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Alphaville,’ and the polished futurism and stiffly remote characters are reminiscent of François Truffaut’s ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ The retro cars, suits, and architecture all put ‘High-Rise’ more in a quaint, remote past than a dystopian future. They also add to the sense of otherworldliness that hangs over the film.

And so does the sense that High-Rise is driven more by Wheatley’s poster-ready striking images —€” a suicide falling from a high balcony in ultra slow motion, Laing expressionless and spattered with paint — than by any sort of human drives. “Laing would surrender to a logic more powerful than reason,” Hiddleston narrates, hand-waving away any irrational behavior. No one in the film really operates on reason, they just represent emotional factions. Wilder becomes a feral, untrustworthy spirit of the denied and oppressed. Ann becomes an equally monstrous symbol of the selfish, out-of-touch aristocracy that actively enjoys spitting on everyone below them. Both sides are poisonous. Laing isn’t an innocent caught in the middle, he’s desperately looking for a place to fit in, and his narrative isn’t about saving anyone, not even himself.

Empire Design
Empire Design

 

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Inside High-Rise

French-book-new2

I’m a bit late to this, but the Creative Review talked to graphic artists Michael Eaton and Felicity Hickson about their fantastic looking work on Ben Wheatley’s film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, which included designing book covers, record sleeves, cigarette packets, supermarket products and apartment plans…

ME: It was a really fun one – from a design point of view, everything just looked so cool from that time. One of the first things I did was the Learn French book… I looked at old 70s school textbooks. And quite early on with Felicity, we worked out what the main fonts of the film would be.

We had fonts on the office wall that Ben and Mark Tildesley, the production designer, liked – certain things would have their own font; the high rise itself, the supermarket and everything had a sort of ‘brand’ within the building. So from the start, you were aware of how you could stick to a certain aesthetic. Then you’d be given your task by the set decorator [Paki Smith] from the script.

FH: We had a few references, but [for the supermarket] Paki had the wonderful idea of using colour as the main graphic; so you’d have these blocks of colour. We did blocks of products, so as you went down the aisle, rather than seeing individual products you saw bold, graphic shapes. It wasn’t a line of ten different brands on the shelf, you had all these own-label ‘Market’ brands. It was a ‘stylised’ view of dressing.

ME: We realised when we saw the shelves just how much it would take to fill the space. We looked at references for that – Andreas Gursky’s shots of supermarkets with loads of repeats of the same packaging, that was the starting point. We also looked at old images of phone books, any kind of instructional manual, toy kits.

We looked at covers of things, such as Penguin books and magazines. Also, the buyers on the film would be out buying props and every so often they’d come in with, say, a box of comics, or TV guides from the 70s. So we had all this great stuff lying around the office we could look through.

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Record-covers

WashingPowder2

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J.G. Ballard Series by Stanley Donwood

jgballard-bookcover-4thestate-theatrocityexhibition-harikunzru

Some how I missed these when they were first published in 2014,1 but British publisher Fourth Estate has reissued 21 books by J.G. Ballard with covers designed Stanley Donwood. Donwood, who is perhaps best known for his artwork for Radiohead, talked about Ballard and the cover designs on the 4th Estate blog:

I have done many strange things in order to design these covers; I’ve visited underground laboratories, watched the huge sky under the Fens, ignited flammable liquids, fired guns, melted quantities of wax, poured liquid nitrogen across a table and taken deliveries of hypodermic needles.

 

(via Rhys Tranter)

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Ever Wanted Something More?

high-rise

Although the early reviews have not been especially kind to the Ben Wheatley film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, the trailer looks amazing.  The Anthony Royal Architecture website is also a nice touch.

I can’t wait.

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The Inner-Space of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise

high-rise design Darren Haggar
design by Darren Haggar

With the release of the Ben Wheatley movie adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston imminent, Chris Hall looks at High-Rise and the ‘inner-space’ of J. G. Ballard’s science fiction for The Guardian:

High-Rise is the final part of a quartet of novels – the first three are The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) – with each book seeded in the previous one. Thematically High-Rise follows on from Concrete Island with its typically Ballardian hypothesis: “Can we overcome fear, hunger, isolation, and find the courage and cunning to defeat anything that the elements can throw at us?” What links all of them is the exploration of gated communities, physical and psychological, a theme that is suggestive of Ballard’s childhood experiences interned by the Japanese in a prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts of Shanghai in the 1940s. It was, he always claimed, an experience he enjoyed.

The built environment is not a backdrop, rather it is integral and distinctive in its recurring imagery – from abandoned runways, to curvilinear flyovers and those endlessly mysterious drained swimming pools. Perhaps more than any other writer, he focused on his characters’ physical surroundings and the effects they had on their psyches. Ballard, who died in 2009, was also interested in the latent content of buildings, what they represented psychologically. Or, as he once obliquely put it, “does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?” – by which he meant that we project narrative on to external reality, that the imagination remakes the world. In Ballard’s fiction, nothing is taken at face value.

In High-Rise and Concrete Island especially, Ballard examines the flip side to what he called the “overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography” that The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash mapped out. Under-imagined or liminal spaces, such as multi-storey car parks and motorway flyovers, act as metaphors for the parts of ourselves that we ignore or are unaware of. His characters are often forced to assess the physical surroundings and, by extension, themselves rather than to take them for granted.

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J. G. Ballard’s Books for Children

ballard-tom-gauld

Not a success? I think he was just ahead of his time…

Tom Gauld

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Sounds from a Concrete Island

I’m sure there are some of you who’ve already heard of UK sound artist Janek Schaefer. He has, after all, been recording and creating sound installations for past 20 years, and he even won the British Composer of the Year award in Sonic Art a few years ago. But, personally, I hadn’t heard of Schaefer until I heard a track from his new album on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC 6Music radio show this evening.

Lay-by Lullaby, released this week on the 12K music label, uses “location recordings made in the middle of the night above the M3 motorway, right at the end of the road where JG Ballard lived, a couple of miles from Schaefer’s studio on the far west edge of London.”

Now, admittedly, the M3 has a special place in my psyche — I drove up and down it rather a lot in my late teens, often late at night — but more significantly Ballard also wrote his “seminal works on car culture” — Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) — as the motorway was being built past the front of his house.

Schaefer’s 73 minute album was created last year as an installation for his show ’Collecting Connections’ at the Agency gallery in London. Apparently the sounds were played on infinite loop through a car radio installed in a little leather travel case and amplified by a pair of reclining traffic cones.

In other Ballard news, director Ben Wheatley announced earlier this week that he would start shooting his adaptation of High-Rise in June with Tom Hiddleston in the lead role.
High-Rise
The teaser poster for the film was created by artist Jay Shaw. You can read more about Shaw’s work, including his poster for Wheatley’s current film, A Field in England, which opened in New York this week, in Adrian Curry’s column for MUBI this week.

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Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World


Will Self on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World at The Telegraph:

To coincide with the 1962 publication of The Drowned World – his own post-apocalyptic novel in which men of the future also venture into a flooded London, intent on looting the city of its treasures – JG Ballard wrote an article for The Woman Journalist in which he explained the mise en scène thus: “On reflection it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some way a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last 10 years in London.”

According to Ballard, “My own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside… was an almost continuous mirror of drowned paddy fields and irrigation canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight.”

There seems no reason to doubt Ballard at his word on this question; one that he proposes himself rhetorically at the outset of the piece: “How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing?”

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, with an introduction by Will Self and illustrations by James Boswell is published by the Folio Society.

A paperback edition of The Drowned World published by W.W. Norton, with a cover design by Darren Haggar (pictured above), is also available.

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A Ballardian Obsession with Materials

 

In what is presumably an excerpt from his new book Stuff Matters, materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik describes how his obsession with materials began with being attacked on the London Underground:

I was right about one thing: he didn’t have a knife. His weapon was a razor blade wrapped in tape. This tiny piece of steel, not much bigger than a postage stamp, had easily cut through five layers of my clothes, and then through the epidermis and dermis of my back in one swipe. When I saw the weapon in the police station later, I was mesmerised. As the police quizzed me, the table between us wobbled and the blade sitting on it wobbled too. In doing so it glinted in the fluorescent lights, and I saw that its steel edge was still perfect, unaffected by its afternoon’s work.

This was the birth of my obsession with materials – starting with steel. I became sensitive to its presence everywhere. I saw it in the tip of the ballpoint pen I was using to fill out the police form; it jangled on my dad’s key ring while he waited, fidgeting; later that day it sheltered and took me home, covering the outside of our car in a layer no thicker than a postcard. When we got home I sat down next to my parents at the kitchen table, and we ate soup together in silence. I even had a piece of steel in my mouth. Why didn’t it taste of anything?

There is something almost Ballardian about the connections Miodownik draws between materials and violence (car accidents, improvised weapons) and, of course, culture:

The fundamental importance of materials is apparent from the names we have used for stages of civilisation – the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Steel was the defining material of the Victorian era, allowing engineers to create suspension bridges, railways, steam engines and passenger liners. The 20th century is often hailed as the Age of Silicon, after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip and the information revolution. Yet this is to overlook the array of other new materials that revolutionised modern living.

Architects took mass-produced sheet glass and combined it with structural steel to produce skyscrapers that invented a new city life. Product and fashion designers adopted plastics and transformed our homes and dress. Polymers were used to produce celluloid and brought about the biggest change in visual culture for 1,000 years, the cinema. The development of aluminium alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to build jet engines and fly cheaply, thus accelerating the collision of cultures. Medical and dental ceramics allowed us to rebuild ourselves and redefine disability and ageing.

The Guardian

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