The High Rise novel, by James Graham Ballard, describes the shocking changes that take place within a small vertical city, a skyscraper, which is located west of central London, whose residents return to a primitive way of living in purpose to survive within the social and structural collapse of the building itself.
Ballard and the “High Rise” somehow managed to monopolize our research around the SF and space in architecture. The reason why, was a question for us too. Perhaps the fact that Ballard, created his own space in his writings, the so-called Ballardian space, a special architectural area , but not perfectly made. The space Ballard creates in his writings is synthetic. A combination of realism with surrealism and the imaginary element. Places purely real, as the HR, a building in the center of London, yet seem isolated in space and time. De touched from the city and the surrounding environment, users interact with the space and with each other and are released by the social conventions of the familiar realistic environment of mega cities.
Ballard, through the HR deconstructs the concept of modernism, introducing us to the clean modernistic world of HR, an experimental city model, which is driven from the full functionality to the malfunction and eventually to the social and structural collapse. By our research, we will try to show you what we have seen in this concrete sky scraper in the west of London, and although it is a figment of Ballard's imagination, it resembles a modern experimental scenario habitation.
