High Rise: painting, book, and film

I saw this painting in September of last year at Tate Modern, and I felt immediately attracted to it without knowing exactly why; the juxtaposition of this enigmatic sentence with these colors and this idyllic landscape were just so fascinating. The label informed me that the painting is called The Music from the Balconies, by Edward Ruscha, from 1984, and that the phrase was pulled from the novel High-Rise, by J. G. Ballard, from 1975. I left the museum straight to a bookstore, and there I learned that the book had also been made into a feature film.

Ballard’s writing is hard to read and digest, but I thoroughly recommend it to architects and urban planners because it is ultimately a modernist dystopia, a Pruitt-Igoe in a brutalist universe in every sense of the word, a tale about the decay of society drenched in surrealism. More specifically, it is about a high-rise in the outskirts of London with 2000 dwellers that increasingly embrace a primitive life and a class struggle for survival, purposely confined in an enormous concrete shell.

I liked it as I read it, but the book really grew on me after having finished it. Everything around me resonated with the story, all of a sudden it seemed so clear that we are always on the limit of civility, whether by poor societal choices or by deliberate escapes in the private realm.

I then moved on to the film, from 2015. It was a pain to find it, and for a reason: it is not that good. There are many positives and a whole bunch of negatives, but its biggest sin is losing the delicate violence that Ruscha’s painting captured so beautifully. In any regard, I highly enjoyed investigating how an idea and a story can unfold in different media spanning decades to such distinct results.