Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.

‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ’sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound- sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so cracked, out of practice and out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda singing like an ‘insane banshee’. Effectively, Mangon manipulates the sounds of the city to assuage his psychological turmoil.

Ballard’s story anticipates R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project, which aimed to reduce the noise pollution of industrial environments in favour of an ‘acoustic ecology’, eliminating so-called ‘bad’ sounds in favour of prescribed ‘good’ sounds, returning to ‘the Ursound’ supposedly found in nature, where, Schafer rhapsodises, ‘listening blindly to our ancestors and the wild creatures, we will feel it surge within us again, in our speaking and in our music’.[3] But as Geoff Manaugh notes: ‘Where the Project went wrong … was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city … and a nostalgic calm … infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles. But where would such sensory cleansing leave those … who enjoy the sounds of factories?’[4]

‘Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

For Ballard, too, neither full reliance on technology (represented by the sterile, calming aesthetic of ultrasonic music) nor the reactionary turn to nostalgia and a safe retreat into the past (ie Mangon’s initial deification of the opera singer) is posited as an adequate solution. Instead, a middle ground is sought, a strategy found throughout his career, grounded in the sense that the built environment must be met on its own terms.

In the novella ‘The Ultimate City’,[5] Ballard moves beyond Mangon’s half-aware thumbnail sketch and into a three-dimensionality: a full-scale cognitive remapping. A future ecotopia, Garden City, has developed wind power and alternative technologies after New York has fallen into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels. The central character, Halloway, dissatisfied with what he sees as the dulling of the imagination in Garden City, with its organic conformity, makes his way back to the abandoned New York, where he attempts to restart the metropolis and its power supplies. Significantly, it is the noise of the city that he misses and that he is inescapably drawn to. With the help of Olds (another mute), Halloway manages to restart the generators and power supplies of a small sector of the city, bringing to life neon and traffic lights, while broadcasting sound- effects records of automobile and aircraft noise:

Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels … Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away.

It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive …[6]

Like Mangon, but on a grander scale, Halloway tunes the city rather than shutting it out, rejecting the sterile, affectless Garden City for a complete reimagining and re-envisaging of the city’s technological grid, including the acoustic footprint that so disturbed the inventors of ultrasonic music. This time, the story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.’[7]

I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment. It is often said that technology and the liminal zones of suburbia and non- place urban fields are his main characters, and indeed the buildings and zones he erects – the motorway system in Crash,[8] the apartment block in High-Rise (’an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’),[9] the secessionist shopping centre in Kingdom Come[10] – all seem imbued with an artificial intelligence determined to eradicate human life as if it were a disease.

This is a gambit that brings sociologist Ron Smith’s observation into stark relief: ‘If you want to see what’s wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine. They’re filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings.’[11] In Ballard, trends (and flaws) in architectural design are pursued to their logical extremes, and then bent backwards or forwards through time to go completely beyond logic. In the real world, people might complain about an escalator too far away from a baggage chute in an airport or a concourse in a mall that heats up too quickly, or overly processed floors that make far too much noise when walked upon. In Ballard, the unspoken tension and psychopathology engendered by such scenarios is recycled, reheated and allowed free rein to play itself out to the bitterest of ends.

‘Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

In High-Rise, which charts the breakdown of the social order in a neo-Corbusian residential building, at first it is the little things that niggle. These then overlay and overlap, each new escalation of hostilities a clear and logical progression from the previous strata, however bizarre each incident might seem in isolation. Parents find that the building hasn’t been designed for children: there is no free, open space, only ’someone else’s car park’. Shared garbage disposal causes anxiety and division between residents. Raucous parties occur on the upper floors, and residents in ‘better-sited apartments’ are unsympathetic to those living below them. Dog owners are attacked for allowing their pets to urinate and defecate in the elevators, culminating in the fateful moment when one resident’s Afghan hound is drowned in the swimming pool.

Thereafter, things really take off: incidents of violent aggression morph into tribal skirmishes and warring groups cut off escalator access, barricading their apartments and ‘Balkanising’ the middle section of flats to form a buffer zone. Yet, after the system has collapsed and failed, what we are left with is more than a mere glimmer of hope, and clearly akin to a programme of resistance based on emergent psychologies and a radical new approach to the built environment: ‘Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.’[12]

Yet just as Positive Soundscapes has encountered resistance in persuading architects and engineers to re- evaluate environmental sound, ‘perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines’[13], chances are you will not find Ballard on the syllabus. According to Nic Clear, who has used Ballard’s work as an aid in architectural learning: ‘Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for “popular” fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject.’[14]

Yet architects have no compunction about appropriating critical theory to their own ends. Peter Eisenman drew heavily on Deleuze and Baudrillard for his conception of ‘interstitial’ architecture and ‘blurred zones’, where the aim was to examine the way the virtual has invaded the actual, displacing architecture’s traditional role as an anchor for the real. Eisenman’s ‘philosophy lite’ sought to invite architecture to explore conceptual spaces located within the ‘folds’ of the built environment, with the aim of ‘refram[ing] existing urbanism, to set it off in a new direction’.[15] But surely the theory of Deleuze (which has more than a few correspondences with the work of Ballard) is designed to inspire affirmation in the reader, the user, the inhabitant; surely it must be tangible and must work in practice, in real-world terms, in that it must inspire thought and positive action to affirm its validity.

‘Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

That to me seems the Deleuzian ideal – indeed, the Ballardian ideal. It would seem apposite to say the majority of criticism of Eisenman’s buildings implies that not only are most users unaware of the inner workings of the ‘process of the interstitial’ that built the thing, but that in the final product antagonism and negation is placed before affirmation and interaction. As Roger Kimball writes: ‘When we encounter a stairway that leads nowhere … we need [Eisenman's] help to understand that we are being given a lesson in linguistic futility. Otherwise we might foolishly conclude that it was just a stairway that led nowhere and wonder about the sanity of the chap who paid the architect’s bill.’[16]

Ballard is interested in urbanism and spatial dynamics as a way to understand the city as narrative. The psychological dimension of urban life plays an important part, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the city on a sensory level. Indeed, he should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making architecture more ‘user friendly’, or to anyone who thinks that architecture should be more than a series of shiny icons designed by remote starchitects. In this, he is ideally matched with the aims of Smith, who believes that ‘to become truly great architects [architecture students] also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists’,[17] and also those of Michael Kroelinger, who teaches a course in ‘Architectural Sociology’ at the University of Nevada that ‘underscores the importance of understanding people’s values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one’.[18]

Architects: read, study and learn from Ballard’s writing. Because it should not be the job of the architect to build worlds and indulge the luxury of allowing them to fail at our expense, but that of the writer, the constructor of virtual worlds that live, breathe and, indeed, die in virtuality so that we, in the actual, do not have to expire to prove a point. Only then should we overlay the virtual with the actual to create a stereoscopic representation, a truly interstitial process that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movement through time and space, perhaps nudging us one step closer to a read/write city in which we are free to ‘tune’ the built environment, [19] free to contribute to the conditions of our cohabitation.

In fact, an interdisciplinary, specifically Ballardian approach may be exactly what is required to shake architecture out of its ‘business as usual’ mentality, forcing it to confront the global economic and environmental crises just over the horizon. Ask the question: is another ’shiny, happy’ building really what we want or need to see or inhabit?

‘He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm … he would set off on foot, … following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Notes
[1] JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[2] Ibid, p 106.
[3] Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum (New York and London), 2006, p 204.
[4] Geoff Manaugh, ‘Audio Architecture’, BLDGBLOG, 10 August 2007. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/audio-architecture.html, accessed 26 January 2008.
[5] JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’ [1976], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[6] Ibid, pp 902, 907.
[7] Positive Soundscapes, ‘Project Overview’, Positive Soundscapes: A Re- evaluation of Environmental Sound. See www.positivesoundscapes.org/project_overview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash [1973], Vintage (London), 1995.
[9] JG Ballard, High-Rise [1975], Flamingo (London), 1993.
[10] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[11] Quoted in Gian Galassi, ‘Community by Design’, UNLV Magazine, Fall 2004. See http://magazine.unlv.edu/Issues/Fall04/community.html>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[12] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit, p 147.
[13] Positive Soundscapes, op cit.
[14] Simon Sellars, ‘Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic
Clear’, Ballardian, 24 December 2008. See www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear- interview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[15] Peter Eisenman (ed), Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998, Monacelli Press (New York), 2002, p 132.
[16] Roger Kimball, ‘Architecture and ideology’, New Criterion, December 2002. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_4_21/ai_n28962509>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[17] Quoted in Gian Galassi, op cit.
[18] Ibid.
[19] I’ve borrowed the concept of the ‘read/write’ city from Steve Lambert of the Anti- Advertising Agency who, writing about the visual environment and street art, states: ‘Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression. Read/write is how democracy works. There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen. Read only culture creates apathy.’ From Steve Lambert, ‘Demand a Read/Write City’, The Anti-Advertising Agency, 3 October, 2008. See http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/demand-a-readwrite-city, accessed 26 January 2009.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Michelle Lord.

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

An artificial reef in the Red Sea, which features in the Landscape Futures section.

Originally published in Blueprint, 19 August 2009.

Los Angeles-based Geoff Manaugh has been described by fellow futurist writer Bruce Sterling as ‘the world’s greatest practitioner of “architecture fiction”’. His online ideas factory, BLDGBLOG, attracts descriptors like ‘promiscuous’ and ‘omnivorous’. His new, beautifully designed book-of-the-blog delivers more of the same. It features cartoons of his trademark ‘urban speculation’, maybe the only medium flexible enough to capture the onslaught.

There are four components treating eclectic aspects of the built environment: subterranean worlds, music/sound/noise, ‘landscape futures’, even climate (the ’space between buildings’). The section on ‘noise’ works best, considering something many architects seem to disregard:”: the acoustic footprint of urban areas and how this might be ‘tuned’ to satisfactory ‘user’ experiences. Discussing the psychological effects of the built environment, Manaugh’s self-acknowledged debt to JG Ballard becomes most apparent. That’s the value of Manaugh’s work. At heart he’s an outsider, an enthusiast armed with a surplus of imagination and creative latitude, voicing ideas a professional insider with all the right references might miss, or wilfully ignore.
The book contains a lot of new material, and some that has been reworked from online. If you know the blog, you’ll know the style: breathless; italicised for emphasis, and exhorting ‘you’ to consider video games and spam email as architecture as much as actual buildings. Such writing might work best in the cross-linkage of the online matrix, although it doesn’t suffer on the page. Among the thoughtful features and interviews, including urban theorist Mike Davis and architect Lebbeus Woods, are numerous sidebars, allowing the reading experience to fold in on it self.

Take Manaugh’s discussion of ‘a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors’. He contemplates how a man with no soul could walk into the infinite non-space generated when two mirrors reflect each other, but then we’re suddenly aboard the International Space Station and he’s conjured up an astronaut, ‘crazed with loneliness’, who sets up two mirrors before wandering inside them, never to return, while back on Earth children sing hymns in remembrance. The hall-of-mirrors metaphor is apt: follow Manaugh, and you never know where you’ll end up – a long way from home, certainly. He should write a novel.
There’ll be protests: ‘that’s not architecture’. But surely all architecture is fantasy on the drawing board until it meets the harsh reality of governance, big business and the real world. And, as Manaugh points out, ‘If architectural critics can get people to realize the everyday spatial world of earthquake safety plans and prison-break films is worthy of architectural analysis, and that architecture is everywhere and everything, then perhaps we’ll learn to stop taking those spaces for granted’. Besides, his burgeoning popularity might help to finally break Ballard in the States. But why no index? It’s annoying: Manaugh chews through so many topics, but good luck finding them in a hurry.

The BLDG Blog book by Geoff Manaugh Chronicle Books, £16.99

ABOVE: ‘London after the Rain’, by Ben Olszyna-Marzys. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

Originally published on ballardian.com, 24 December 2008.

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

While Le Corbusier appears to be (mis)remembered by history for supposedly self-important, grandiose plans to realise an architectural utopia that ignored the basic requirements of its inhabitants, Ballard, according to Manaugh, assumes increasing importance for the manner in which his work acutely analyses the ways in which the built environment can impact psychologically on its users and inhabitants. This includes, he elaborates, an identification of a ‘constant dissatisfaction with … architectural surroundings [that] becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst’. For Manaugh, the ‘psycho spatial’ nature of ‘Ballardian space’ is best articulated by Concrete Island, High-Rise and Super-Cannes, which he has utilised to varying degrees as the cornerstones of several BDLGBLOG posts.

Within the creative arts, the Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord exhibited a series of images that used imagery from Concrete Island and Ballard’s novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976) to examine the legacy of Brutalist architecture in Britain. Lord’s work explicitly critiques the utopian ’social idealism’ of Brutalism, itself a descendant of the Le Corbusier school of architecture, and the fashion in which it disregarded ‘the communal, historic and surrounding built environment’. Yet Lord also successfully captures the sense of ambivalence that powers ‘The Ultimate City’, with its depiction of a far-future, ‘post technological’ world in which the harshness of the urban environment is rejected in favour of a ‘green’, sterile ecotopia, only to be fatally underscored by a lingering lament for the decline of industrial landscapes.

Academically, Ballardian Studies is an emerging discipline in architectural schools. Here, the website of the London-based firm, Azhar Architecture, is instructive, featuring a list entitled ‘What’s being recommended in Architecture Schools: A Sample’. High-Rise, tracking the breakdown of social order in a Corbusian apartment block, is included alongside works from Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Deleuze & Guattari and Guy Debord. At Columbia University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Professor Ursula Heise taught a subject entitled ‘Modern and Postmodern Cities’, in which depictions of ‘the metropolis and urban life’ were considered in 20th-century literature. One session was given over to two Ballard short stories, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and ‘Billennium’ (1962), which rank among the author’s most effective portrayals of the sensory overload of big-city life. Conceptually, the stories are at polar opposites, thematically they are of a piece: the absolute alliance of architecture with late capitalism. ‘Billennium’ is concerned with the complete contraction of public and private space by an overbearing architecture, while ‘Concentration City’ is based on the premise that the city is ever-expanding, without limits, its boundaries unable to be located by the central protagonist, who, no matter how far he travels, ends up where he started.

But the most ambitious academic program to date is almost certainly ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, which was taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2007-08. For Clear and Kennedy, the ’speculative’ nature of Ballardian architectural space is all-important. The course, which utilised film and animation, video and motion-graphic techniques to devise representations of ’synthetic space’, challenged students to examine architectural themes across the broad span of Ballard’s writing. The aim was to process the manner by which he deploys ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ environments to form a coherent analysis of the challenges inherent in a supersaturated technological world. Clear and Kennedy, like Manaugh, also point to the psychological effects of architecture, which leads on to their consideration of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film, London Orbital, as a text not only influenced by Ballard but also by the psychogeographical revival that Sinclair is closely associated with.

I recall in my interview with Manaugh, where I mentioned how I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine…’ You can understand my excitement upon learning of Unit 15! I decided therefore to contact Nic Clear, and pin him down about Ballard, architecture and the fabulous work created by Unit 15, as well as the new U15 program for 2008-09, ‘The Near Future Part II’, which questions whether the utopianism of the ‘corporate architectural complex’ is viable in a world riven by conflict.

Simon Sellars

ABOVE: ‘The Sound-Sweep’, by George Thomson, based on the story by J.G. Ballard. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenberg’s Crash and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun. We shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. In short, we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered BALLARDIAN.

Nic Clear & Simon Kennedy, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, Unit 15, Bartlett School of Architecture, 2007-08.

SIMON SELLARS: Nic, how did the idea for ‘Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future’ come about?

NIC CLEAR: I’ve been interested in Ballard’s writing for many years; I was a big Joy Division fan and read The Atrocity Exhibition simply because they wrote a song with the same name. More recently, it struck me that the themes in Ballard’s work seem to address the issues about the built environment that architectural discourse seems to avoid: namely, how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling, or have fallen apart. Architecture always seems to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails.

SS: How have your students responded to Ballard’s work?

NC: The projects have been very successful, and the use of a literary point of departure has been quite liberating. The Ballardian theme has allowed students to really speculate on what they are doing, but also, more importantly, why they are doing it.

SS: Besides Unit 15, it seems there are a few architects, architectural critics, architecturally-minded artists and architecture schools that are starting to take notice of Ballard’s work.

NC: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture — maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction — writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist — and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian’. Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Many people may think that Ballard’s characters face the scenarios he creates with an unbelievable stoicism, although Ballard has an advantage over us, as most of us have never had to face any kind of catastrophe. I think the experiences of life in Shanghai during WWII made Jim believe that the human race is able to endure — and inflict — almost any horror imaginable.

ABOVE: A film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: A wider, and resurgent, trend in film and literature, which Ballard seems to have anticipated, is the idea that on some level we secretly desire the apocalypse, that we welcome the chance to explore the farthest limits of alienation. This is something that Chris Nakashima-Brown articulates very well: ‘The persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level … the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.’

NC: Many people may fantasise about these scenarios, but when it comes to losing their own luxuries, people will vote for whoever offers the easiest way out — which most often involves blaming someone else. The most depressing part of how current economic and social structures start falling apart is that, instead of embracing the liberating potential of re-structuring and re-organising, politically things could start getting much more conservative. This is obviously another common theme in Ballard. I grew up in the 70s with the three-day week and the winter of discontent, with the parks of London used as rubbish dumps, but for me it was great power cuts and no school, and out of it came punk … yet the down side was Thatcherism. Obviously the next few years will be catastrophic for ‘big business’ (is that so bad?), and the fall out will be difficult for many, but we will adjust to yet another ‘new normal’. We may even in the long run be better off as a society for it.

Personally, this will be my third major recession, and they are always the most productive times: when no one has money, money stops mattering.

SS: High-Rise is the obvious book to cite when discussing Ballard and architecture. Which of his other works is relevant?

NC: It’s easier to say which one’s aren’t relevant, and the answer to that is probably none! Crash is a personal favourite, I like the perversity of it; it takes the whole modernist fetishisation of technology and mixes it with contemporary obsessions like celebrity cults. The problem with the film was that it was soft-core pornography — all those shots of Debra Unger’s stockings — when really the book is quite hardcore: the leaky orifices, the polysexuality and the car as augmented bodily technology. It’s a surrealist masterpiece up there with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’.

SS: When I interviewed Geoff Manaugh, he defined ‘Ballardian space’ as ‘psycho spatial’. I’d be interested in your take.

NC: If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city — especially London — then you are pretty close.

SS: Does this relate to Unit 15’s research into ’synthetic space’?

NC: Synthetic space is the merging of the actual and virtual; writers like Ballard and Burroughs have been describing synthetic space for years. Within architectural terms, I see it as the inability to differentiate between spaces and their representations — where spatial representations are increasingly becoming spatial propositions.

SS: Ballard is famously obsessive about multi-storey car parks. What do they mean to him, do you think?

NC: The defining symbol of the 20th century is the motor car, and car parks are part palace and part mausoleum. They also tend to be quite ugly and boring, though often in a strangely beautiful and interesting way, and that sort of perversity defines Ballard’s aesthetic.

SS: For my PhD, I was researching contemporary attitudes towards modernist architecture and came across the critical reaction to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. I was completely shocked by Simon Jenkins’ response, which verged on demonic possession. He took particular exception to modernist architects, who he said were ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’, and equates them with Hitler. (But as Deyan Sudjic riposted, such a caricature misrepresents ‘the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression… none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went’.) Why does Brutalist architecture in Britain continue to provoke such rage?

NC: The British establishment, and the English in particular, still have a real suspicion of architectural modernism, seeing it as ‘elitist’, ‘European’ and ’socialist’. Brutalism especially has become a scapegoat for the failure of that post-war welfare state optimism. Of course, this is rubbish: the real failure lies in the political and cultural failure to actually bring about a more egalitarian and democratic society.

SS: On the other hand, as the antithesis to Jenkins, Ballard said: ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton’.

NC: I always imagine that Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes was designed by someone like Manser. But lets face it, we can’t always trust such pronouncements by Jim, especially if it was for the benefit of the Guardian — imagine all that liberal angst and hand wringing.

ABOVE: A film by Peter Kidger, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: In his review of Davis’s City of Quartz, Ballard welcomes ‘unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride’. He suggests that architects and urban planners need to ‘make the most of this’, letting the environment guide them almost as if it is sentient, rather than conforming to the reverse, ie, the old ideal of the arrogant architect imposing his grand vision on the environment (in High-Rise, this was the downfall of the architect Royal). Do you agree with Ballard?

NC: ‘Unrestricted’ would be the key term; the brilliance of Davis’s analysis is to show how clearly urban planning follows such a narrow set of vested interests. Less planning, less controls, less regulation would only work if it also meant less greed, and what are the chances of that? It reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote on the free market: ‘it sounds like a great idea, maybe we should try it sometime’.

SS: Rem Koolhaas seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the architects in Ballard’s stories: the ego, the vainglory, the architect as self-styled eccentric…

NC: He probably likes to think he does. I like Ballard’s architects: they seem genuinely optimistic and have a faith, albeit misguided, in the power of architecture to change society for the good. They are of a much older generation — Ballard’s. I bet Robert Maitland would send angry letters into Building Design, the weekly British architectural newspaper, complaining about these new-fangled projects.

Rem’s recent work, especially in China, strikes me as cynical. His obsession with celebrity, especially his own, seems to be his main driving force, and like many ‘good’ Marxists of his generation, he has become a consummate capitalist. He is much more like Wilder Penrose from Super-Cannes — without the humour.

SS: Does architecture still have an image problem, then, in terms of this archetype of the arrogant, narcissistic architect imposing his vision on the people?

NC: Yes, because most of us are arrogant and narcissistic.

SS: In books such as Concrete Island and stories like ‘The Ultimate City’, Ballard depicts architecture as an instrument of oppressive capitalism, and architects as contributing to that oppression. For Ballard, it seems to me, no architect can be truly radical, or can truly think of architecture as ‘art’ when they are either carrying out the wishes of the State, mobilising state funds to realise their designs, or carrying out the desires of big business. Is this an accurate summation of architectural practice today? How would you reconcile that frustration with a pure creative spirit?

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.’

Little has changed since; in fact, things have got worse. Architecture is now synonymous with the architectural profession (or Corporate Architectural Complex), speculation is financial rather than intellectual, and architects have been complicit with the kind of greedy thinking and acting that has got us into the current global financial crisis. We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings — that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.

SS: Ballard says that ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us.’ Any thoughts on that?

NC: For novelty architecture, see my answer on Rem. A couple of years ago I used the phrase ‘Shapist Architecture’, taken from Tony Hancock’s 1961 film The Rebel, a satire on the art world. At one point he says, ‘I don’t paint the object, I paint the shape around the object’. Developments in the use of computer software have allowed architects to come up with a variety of three-dimensional forms, which has led to a whole raft of ‘blobby’ buildings, a lot of which appear to be self-indulgent and that confuse ‘looking interesting’ with ‘being interesting’ and ‘looking complex’ with ‘complexity’. We have an architecture of the image.

SS: In Ballard, architecture is often used as a form of social control. Did you perceive any similarities between the nature and cause of the banlieue riots in France in 2005, and the breakdown of society depicted in High-Rise?

NC: Not really. High Rise is about a rejection of convivial social structures and returning to a more ‘primitive’ social model. There is a brilliant French film from 1973 called Themroc
directed by Claude Faraldo, which seems to have a greater affinity with High-Rise, published two years later. In it, a blue-collar worker rejects his mundane life, knocks the front wall out of his apartment and starts living like a caveman. However, Kingdom Come, in many ways, does describes the type of anomie and alienation that dominates the urban periphery. Boredom and disenfranchisement brought about by simply being defined by what we consume are the most incendiary factors in the contemporary city.

ABOVE: A film by Dan Farmer, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Do you think Ballard has much at all to do with psychogeographical conceptions of urban space? He appears to have been co-opted into the ‘movement’, such as it is.

NC: It seems everyone’s a psychogeographer nowadays. Psychogeography was originally articulated by the Situationists as an experimental form of urbanism that attempted a critique of the hegemonic values of urban planning and zoning by emphasising the ‘transience’ of the urban experience. The political aspect of psychogeography has been diminished in favour of a ‘poetics’ of the city. I think Ballard in some of his writing retains a lot more of that political conception of psychogeography than many who have fashionably co-opted that term.

SS: What role does film, video, animation and motion graphics play in your course? How can film methodology help to illuminate architectural design?

NC: My main interest in time-based techniques is the ability to tell stories. However, at a pedagogic level, working with film, video and animation does teach a whole number of organisational and aesthetic skills, so despite my anti-profession rhetoric, I seem to be doing a very good job in equipping students to operate very successfully within the profession.

SS: In The Atrocity Exhibition, there are many scenarios in which mental patients are encouraged to make their own films as therapy. Without wishing to casting aspersions on the mental health of your students(!), were the many references to DIY film aesthetics in the book an inspiration for your decision to use Ballard and film as a way into thinking about architecture? (Recall that in Atrocity, these amateur films recast the media landscape and the built environment in ‘ways that make sense’.)

NC: The way I teach is very much geared toward helping students find a voice, whether that is therapeutic is unimportant (to me) — besides, I hate that psychoanalytic model of teaching, just as much as I hate the paternalistic model.

SS: Sure, but I wasn’t really referring to the thereaputic aspects, though, more the DIY angle and the mediation of the built environment.

NC: The main decision to start using film in the way I teach architecture, which I have been doing since 1999, was simply because it was what I was doing myself. The rise of CGI, animation and the availability of digital video made it a much more accessible and viable way of generating, developing and communicating architectural and spatial ideas and narratives. The influence of lo-fi (as opposed to DIY) artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Nauman or Burroughs was an attraction, but it was the availability of the technology that got me going.

SS: Do you think Ballard is an especially ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ writer?

NC: Yes, which is why the English literary establishment still treats him with suspicion since he is not a ‘literary’ writer. Ballard wants to create images and tell stories rather than impress with literary form.

SS: I think the films your students have turned out are simply stunning, especially considering they don’t have a ’studio budget’ to work with — the filmmakers, as well as you and everyone involved, should be applauded. But besides making films, you also looked at feature-film versions of Ballard’s work. How can an analysis of these adaptations help in understanding ’speculative, narrative architectures’ in Ballard’s writing?

NC: I have taken this particular position for two reasons: to engage with a critique of contemporary architecture, and because it’ s fun. The filmic analysis was just a starting point; out of all the films we watched, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition and Sinclair and Petit’s London Orbital were the most influential.

Architecture should not be left to architects — the whole discourse needs opening up. The reason why I earlier questioned whether architectural criticism exists is simply because architecture is an incredibly insular and hermetic discipline — no one dares criticise the Rems, the Dannys or the Zahas for fear of being locked out. Magazines need content and they publish pretty much anything and everything without questioning it; if they did question it, then the content would dry up.

SS: It’s good to see Jonathan Weiss’s film gaining recognition. What do you appreciate about it?

NC: The fact that he had the guts to take it on with virtually no budget. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most ‘Burroughsian’ of all Ballard’s writing and I think Weiss has captured that. The use of found footage and the dislocated time line have echoes in the literary character of the book, and bits of the film are extremely beautiful to look at. I can’t stand the criticism that it doesn’t make sense or is difficult: these criticisms seem to ignore the difficulties of the original text.

ABOVE: ‘The Knife’ by Mario Balducci, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Who else do you think would make a good fist of adapting Ballard?

NC: Taakishi Miike to direct High Rise as a total gore-fest, Michael Mann to direct Super-Cannes — and I’m working on an adaptation of ‘Motel Architecture’.

SS: Taakishi Miike? Good call! But tell me about your own adaptation.

NC: I’m going through the shower scene from Pyscho frame by frame to develop the analysis that JG alludes to in ‘Motel Architecture’. I’ve mapped out a rough script and hope to shoot something in the new year. Part of what I am doing for ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design I’m guest editing, will be based on this project (some sort of ‘House Of The Future’) — the other part is an essay/rant against the architectural profession.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978).

SS: The guest issue of AD was originally going to be explicitly ‘Ballardian, wasn’t it?

NC: The publication, in its current form, has changed from being explicitly about Ballard and Ballard’s writings to something more general: an antidote to the shiny ‘bigness’, ‘everything’s great’ vision of contemporary architecture presented by the mainstream architectural press. The guiding principles are still thoroughly ‘Ballardian’, even though I have opened the discussion up. I would still like to do a purely Ballardian book and will use The Near Future as a first step.

This is the blurb for the issue, which I think neatly sums up my aims for the whole Near Future project:

For the last 20 years, the architectural profession has been complicit with the laissez-faire ideology of late capitalism, assuming that the economic forces of growth and expansion are the only means by which society can develop and prosper.

The current economic crisis makes us question whether a future of unlimited growth is not only possible, but taking into account environmental factors, actually advisable. We have reached a moment of crisis — economic, environmental and technological — where we have to make choices about the type of future that we want, but also the type of future we can actually achieve.

It would appear that the Architectural Profession has nothing to say except ‘business as usual’, as it continues to produce bright, shiny renders of schemes that will sit empty for years. This proposed issue of Architectural Design offers a series of alternate voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and trying to find visions of the future, not simply images of the future.

The proposed issue offers a diverse set of ideas that explore a number of possible ‘Near Futures’ — futures that may be influenced the resurgence of gout in Swindon, or take precedent from an analysis of the political landscape of Southern Italy where in some areas a state of effective lawlessness exists.

The issue combines critical analysis with gorgeous graphics, and features work produced at the margins of contemporary architectural practice. Drawing on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, post-modern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, developments in neurology as well as the fictional writings of authors such as J G Ballard and William Gibson, ‘The Near Future’ will present a series of polemical blasts that are intended to rock the cosy world of architectural discourse.

Thank you, Nic Clear and Unit 15. ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic, will be published in September 2009.

ABOVE: ‘Nic’s right-hand talking to Evis, starring Nic Clear’. Video via archimaxx.

Photo: Andrew Rowat. (More photos here.)

Originally published in Dwell, May 2008.

Aaron Roberts and Thomas Bailey, the young architects behind room11, teamed up to design a house for Aaron’s parents, fixing the structure into the topography of the site.

The Kingston House is deceptive. From the street only the property’s raised garage can be seen, tucked away amid neighboring Truman Show lawns—force fields surrounding identikit brick-veneer suburbia. The house itself is over the rise, on a hilly incline. Visible from the house’s sundeck is Kingston Beach to the east, and expanding northwards from there is the Derwent River. To the west there’s a small verdant valley. And somewhere past that are the shops and business district of Kingston, an outer suburb of Hobart, the capital of Tasmania—Australia’s only island state. To the north is Mount Wellington, the4,170-foot-high peak that owns Hobart’s skyline.

Looking back from down the hill, near the valley, it’s hard to pick out the house. The dark shell blends in with the earthy hillside and weather-beaten trees, while the large front windows reflect and absorb the sky. “We didn’t want it to be this big element stuck out on the hill, mansion-style,” says Aaron Roberts, from the Hobart-based architecture firm room11, and co-designer of the house with Thomas Bailey.

At close range, the building is a monolith, its plywood facade treated and stained with dark Madison oil and sharply delineated by the lightness of the decking, which is constructed from local celery-top pine. Towards the entrance, the monolith is sliced open by a long void between house and deck, filled with ornamental pear trees. As the trees change hue and texture throughout the seasons, they enhance “the qualities of the living space, emotionally and experientially,” according to Aaron—something akin to a “seasonal body clock.” The cutaway also serves to reveal Mount Wellington, double-framed from inside by the windows on the near and far sides. As Aaron says, regarding the textured, rough-hewn rock shelf to the right of the building, “We used to come and sit on the rock shelf and think about how the house might be planned. We always seemed to gravitate to that spot, looking back at the mountains and down at the water, and we wanted the house to retain that perspective.”

The project originated just after Aaron had finished university—his clients were his parents, Diane and Hayden Roberts, who run a newsagency in Kingston. According to Hayden, “we basically said we wanted three bedrooms, and that was the brief really.” The design went through seven stages over a period of ten years, beginning with a typical graduate conceit. “Back then,” Aaron says, laughing, “the design was like a curved wave! Like the wing of a plane.” He wasn’t thinking of emotional effects until later, when he began to make connections between the stressful nature of his parents running their own business and the tension of managing his own practice. As a result, he says, “I really wanted to make a calming place, with luxury in the form of space and volume rather than, say, gold-plated taps.” That calmness is apparent in the upstairs living area, which smells like clean living, especially when the windows are open. Furnishings are sparse and elegant—understatement is understandable given the view, engorged with Mount Wellington’s natural theatrics and a sensual lull of sloping hills and inclines. As Diane enthuses, “I just feel so relaxed here, like I’m on holiday all the time. I never want to leave.”

Aaron says he and Bailey conceived “the whole building as one solid, large object that has had elements pulled out of it or cut away, as opposed to a multiplicity of elements that come together.” This thesis is clearly on display in the home’s second void: a square enclosure featuring a Japanese maple, with glass walls connecting it to the master bedroom and bathroom, unifying, in Aaron’s words, this “very intimate zone.” Chocolate-colored, leaf-themed tiles enhance the mood of the bathing space—“it’s more patterned, more personal down at this end of the house,” he notes—and the surrounding walls are lofty enough to deter peeping toms. Both private and expansive, this space is a big hit with Diane and Hayden, although, as Aaron points out, his mother was initially resistant to his ideas.

Diane does admit to worrying about what her family would think—and her father, especially, as a member of a conservative older generation for whom the thought of designer architecture doesn’t sit well with traditional concerns of practicality and comfort. (But even he was impressed with the smaller void. “Now, that’s a bathroom!” he apparently exclaimed on his first visit to the house.) Added to that, after vacationing in Queensland and seeing “big white rendered houses with big white pillars and lovely plants out the front,” Diane says she envisaged something similar, and was thrown by Aaron’s decision to use sparse vegetation rather than lush evergreens. “But as the seasons change,” she says, “they come out in multitudes of blossoms. And I remember ringing Aaron and saying, ‘I’m so glad you did this because I know I was a pain!’”

For Diane, the way the living space and kitchen area merge with no classical sense of division also took some getting used to. For Aaron, though, the concept made sense. “We design houses by looking at the architecture as a vessel, almost like a tent as such. It just stops the wind and the cold but at the same time you are able to inhabit that landscape, that place.”

Elaborating on their design philosophy, Aaron says room11 is investigating ways “to make denser spaces in the city, researching how people might live in smaller spaces. Everyone wants the great Australian dream, the backyard and all that, but the reality is the environment can’t handle it.” So the firm is developing an innovative system of modular housing, “pre-engineered planning for a series of buildings where people could add to the building and take away as needed—an affordable green alternative to standard brick-veneer boxes. It becomes sustainable through the smallness of the building: less to heat, less to light, less services.” In recognition of its efforts, room11 has been invited to exhibit at the 2008 Royal Australian Institute of Architects national conference. The conference explores the impact of globalization on “meaningful architectural practice,” and room11’s brief is to map out how Sydney might deal with various environmental challenges in the year 2025. These challenges will, of course, include drought, which already affects—even shapes—life Down Under.

Though the Kingston House may not exactly be small, it does embody the room11 attitude, made apparent by the cozy temperature of the living space and by one of its most striking features, the uncarpeted concrete floor. Aaron explains that after Diane and Hayden returned from Queensland raving about the hot weather there, they decided to employ the concrete slab “as a big thermal bank so that heat stays in the building until late.” If it does get too warm, he says, “you can open up the windows and the sea air will suck that hot air through.” Hayden reckons they’ve not had to turn on the heating for months—remarkable for Tasmania, which does get cold—while Diane owns up to more skepticism: “I’m a farm girl originally. I always thought concrete floors belonged in barns.”

In light of all this, it’s not too far-fetched to see the organic modernism of the Kingston House as a working model of an eminently possible future. Intimately integrated, its low-impact footprint enables the outdoors to permeate the house but also allows the landscape to breathe and grow.

As the RAIA conference will doubtlessly reinforce, the house—and room11—is meaningful architectural practice in action. But, of course, Diane and Hayden need no further testimony.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Originally published on ballardian.com, 7 November 2006.

Geoff Manaugh is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in Contemporary, Space & Culture, Blend, Lumpen, Inhabitat, WorldChanging, the Oyster Boy Review, the Urban Design Review, Subtopia, Vector, things magazine, and The Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection (a short essay in the CD liner notes). He’s also a contributing editor at Archinect, and Senior Editor for David Haskell’s Urban Design Review. And he’s the main man behind BLDGBLOG, a blog devoted to ‘architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures’. BLDGBLOG is very popular — it’s namechecked in the current Blackberry Pearl ad campaign featuring Douglas Coupland. It’s also wildly divergent, eclectic and challenging, and it never fails to command the attention, as Geoff examines the built world from all angles, and even from the upper atmosphere (via Google Earth), leaping around from posts on London’s subterranean system of drains, sewers and bunkers to whole suburbs thrown into space; from Indian superhighways to acoustic landscapes; from cathedrals made of magma to ‘psychovideography’; from military urbanism to sustainable urbanism; from derelict utopias to 3D models of plate tectonics.

Geoff’s a futurist, probably in many senses of the word: he’s interested in the future of the planet as seen through the lens — the social function — of technology itself. But he’s no Marinetti; Manaugh instead takes a Ballardian approach, using the distancing device of J.G. Ballard’s mid-period novels to bring a psychological attitude fully formed from the future, depositing it in the present day as if it was commonplace. At times, BLDGBLOG reads like it’s the log book of some far-future space explorer who has landed on an uninhabited Earth and is attempting to form an archaeology of the planet’s past by examining its technological tracks and traces — the architectural, built space we are currently weaving around us.

That Ballard reference is not casual. Manaugh acknowledges our favourite writer as an influence, and more than one BLDGBLOG post expands on models or scenarios outlined in a JGB novel — typically The Drowned World, Concrete Island or Super-Cannes, the cornerstones of the BLDGBLOG world view.

I spoke to Geoff Manaugh about BLDGBLOG, and Ballard, and Geoff’s as-yet-unpublished novel, and a lot more.

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Simon Sellars
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SIMON: What motivated you to start a blog devoted to “architectural conjecture, urban speculation, and landscape futures”?

GEOFF: I was reading Super-Cannes, writing my own first novel, recovering from abdominal surgery, and auditing a university course about Archigram, the 1960s British pop-utopian architecture group; those things just came together somehow – and, one morning, on a whim, I started BLDGBLOG. Now I work on it almost constantly. It’s been two years.

BLDGBLOG became pretty well-defined, with a small but growing readership, and it had a voice, a tempo, an energy, a feel. It was no longer just an ‘architecture’ blog; it had its own direction and orientation, and it was even verging on science fiction in some ways. Short stories in the disguise of architectural theory. Ideas for screenplays. In that regard, BLDGBLOG became more literary – by which I don’t mean to compliment my writing abilities, but to say that the site became its own kind of genre: architectural criticism as a kind of literary form. Somewhere between science fiction, a short story collection, a Don Delillo novel, and a kind of technical catalogue for a world that didn’t exist. Which, incidentally, is how I view a lot of Ballard’s work. So if BLDGBLOG could ever equal Ballard in that regard, I’d be a very happy man!

It’s worth adding that a lot of the architects I admire also use architecture as a form of social critique, or political allegory: Archigram, Rem Koolhass, even Piranesi or Will Alsop. The Agents of Change. Speculative architectural treatises are an extremely exciting, if totally unacknowledged, branch of the literary arts. Look at Thomas More’s Utopia. Or China Miéville. Or, for that matter, J.G. Ballard.

Testing, testing… Is this on… Corporate, automobile test-landscapes. Deserted beach resorts. Ruined stripmalls.

‘Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system’. J.G. Ballard

More soon.

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BLDGBLOG’s first post. Wednesday, 7 July, 2004
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BLDGBLOG has covered diverse territory, but your basic obsessions were clearly set out in your very first post. Can you elaborate on the Ballardian elements in your work?

One of the things I like about Ballard is how he treats architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation.

Ballardian space is psycho-spatial. His books are full of artificial lakes, highway medians, multi-storey car parks, strangely over-air-conditioned corporate boardrooms – and these all take on a kind of menacing, even confrontational, gleam, as if you’ve just stepped into some kind of unspoken mental challenge. The buildings and cities and landscapes in Ballard’s novels are more like psychological traps built by management consultants – not architects – who then fly overhead in private jets, looking down, checking whether their complicated theories of human cognition have survived the test. Where ‘the test’ is the world you and I now live in.

Each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from his mind. By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis”.

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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Of course, any built environment has a psychological impact on the people who live there. In Super-Cannes, for instance, the book’s setting – an office park – is haunted by a kind of ‘controlled and supervised madness,’ Ballard writes. One of the characters explains, at great length, how the too-perfect and over-manicured landscapes of this new corporate enclave inspire sexual violence and anti-immigrant raids – a rebellion against the boredom of tennis courts and well-mowed lawns. Every artificial landscape is the diagram of a certain psychological state – even if that just means reflecting the dominant aesthetic of the day. But the idea that the built landscape can be read as an ‘encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis,’ as Ballard writes, crossing generations and countries, just fascinates me.

Space in Ballard’s novels is never deeply textured or deeply described. Instead, you get these abstract non-places – a corporate campus, a media center, a fitness complex. You drive down feeder roads and airport roundabouts and cross-city motorways. You never enter a world of rich, Dickensian details. He’s like the anti-Dickens. You don’t walk past churches and bookshops and local bars and farmers’ markets and whatever else makes a believable urban setting; you’re always out in this weird edge-world of import warehouses and corporate development projects. Sports-car dealerships. The very lack of detail is what makes a setting Ballardian.

That’s Ballard’s fabled inner space, isn’t it — a neurological world unable to be verified beyond the shifting data of sensory input?

Yes and no. I think there’s a shift in Ballard’s work, from the earlier, almost psychedelic concerns of something like The Drowned World — where all the characters verge on an evolutionary regression to this kind of quasi-reptilian psychological state — compared to the more socioeconomic concerns of Ballard’s later novels, like Millennium People.

In other words, I’d agree with you that there’s a mental/cognitive/neurological world at play in Ballard’s work — but I think the larger significance of that world has shifted over the course of his career. For instance, Ballard’s early stories might suggest that one of the characters has an inability to perceive anything outside his own nervous system, for neuro-anatomical reasons; but now Ballard would emphasise something else. He wouldn’t blame anatomy — the human nervous system — but would use instead his own peculiar version of psychoanalysis to say that the reason you can’t understand or fully interact with the outside world is because of sexual repression or cultural hang-ups — or sheer corporate sociopathology — not because of your reptilian cortex, or because of certain hormones.

So I think Ballard’s gone from blaming the body, or neuro-chemical imbalances, on behalf of his narrators to blaming culture and the economy and sexual mores for his characters’ often hilariously bizarre activities.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”.

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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On BLDGBLOG, you once wrote, “Super-Cannes is a novel – but it’s also a work of architectural criticism”.

Yes — it’s about architecture and corporate real estate as much as it is about the central murder mystery we’re meant to solve. I think it’s a great book. Ballard managed to write a bona fide page-turner, with a genuinely gripping plot and loads of hilarious throwaway lines, and to do so even as he took the same kind of socio-architectural analysis from High-Rise – even Concrete Island – to a new level, critiquing global capitalism itself and not just suburban condo politics. Too often Ballard just comes up with a setting, or an image, while all the rest stalls, like in The Day of Creation, which I think is a failure. There’s nothing there — it’s a military camp in the desert, near a polluted river, with a derelict cinema and an unused airfield and … who cares? The book goes nowhere. Just write a poem, or take a photograph, or use that as one image in a much larger project — because there’s not enough there for a novel.

Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise are often spoken of in the same breath, given that they’re the most airtight, hermetically sealed Ballard novels of all, but I’ve never seen BLDGBLOG quote, or refine, or retool Crash in any way. C’mon, man – it’s got cars, motorways and a totally self-contained psychopathology completely mediated by built space. It’s the spinal landscape projected onto the media landscape, the Ballardian thought lab par excellence, stuffed with in-jokes, satire, surrealist smart-bombs…

I found Crash almost unreadable – not because it offended me, but because I found it badly written and just incredibly obvious. More to the point, it didn’t read like Ballard was having a good time when he wrote it. It reads like he’d rather have been doing something else – and so the book feels dry. It feels sterile. His other books just zip along – and that feeling of effortlessness carries you with it.

I think Ballard said somewhere that if he ever got an erection while writing Crash — because of its weird, auto-centric eroticism — then he would have failed. But I think that’s exactly why the book itself fails: if Ballard actually had created a world of sexualised car crashes and literal auto-eroticism that had succeeded in turning him on, then that enthusiasm would have found its way into the writing. You would have felt it. As it is, the book was empty for me. Even the humour doesn’t ring true. It should have been a short story — because then, of course, I’d be saying it’s brilliant!

I think Crash is maybe too close to The Atrocity Exhibition. To some extent, Crash doesn’t even read like it’s meant to be published in novel form. The Atrocity Exhibition is very upfront with its nonlinear structure and its somewhat improvised – if also completely nonexistent – narrative, and so it works for me; but Crash neither rid itself of that Atrocity Exhibition-like fragmentation nor fit itself fully into the structure of a novel. Maybe it shouldn’t be called a novel: it’s just a text…

What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash?

It’s alright — but I’m not a big fan. It takes itself way too seriously, for instance, and ends up just boring the shit out of everyone. I think it was miscast, badly paced, and not explicit enough about its themes. As it is, the movie appears to be about a bunch of dull and uninteresting Canadians who get into a car accident one day and end up wife-swapping. Yet, having said that, the movie isn’t funny at all.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

A film of High-Rise is in development, with Vincent Natali attached to direct. But does the symbolism of the high rise really apply to America? It’s not really a ‘high rise’ culture, is it?

I think only in low income, public housing projects — like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green — does high-rise architecture have any sort of psycho-sociological place in the United States. Obviously, you have high-rise living in Manhattan and Chicago and Boston and even L.A. — and Miami, Atlanta, and so on — but I don’t think the buildings themselves have been marketed to their future residents as ‘an experiment in modern living’, or some such, where the narrative of the building itself implies that something will be different there, something will happen there that has never happened before… Which I think was the explicit promise of London high-rises in the 1970s — especially Canary Wharf, later, during the Thatcher years — thus setting up the Ballardian twist: an architectural experiment gone awry. Of course, an American version of High-Rise would undoubtedly be set in a gated Orange County suburb. And I think it’d be brilliant. If I was a publisher I’d commission it, in fact,

Much of the discourse on Ballard springs from English critics. As an American, do you see him as an especially British writer?

Actually, no. I think, aside from vocabulary and punctuation and spelling — and Ballard’s settings, of course — it’s not at all obvious that Ballard is English. You can make points about sense of humour and so on, but Ballard doesn’t strike me as a British writer in the same way that Ian McEwan does, or Iain Sinclair. Or even Iain Banks. Ballard’s book don’t sell well in the U.S., but that’s entirely a top-down problem. I think the American publishing industry is in a state of free-fall, marketing all the wrong books in all the wrong ways. Trying to market Ballard would never occur to them. They want to sell people John Updike novels in hardcover — despite the fact that no one wants John Updike novels, and hardcover books are completely obsolete as a format. So they ‘experiment’ by publishing 900-page hardcover epics about farm life in 1920s Nebraska — and then still seem surprised that no one’s reading fiction in this country.

Short, good, fairly priced, intellectually progressive paperback books — that’s all you need.

Which Ballard book would you like to see filmed?

You’re going to think I’m out of my mind, but I’d like to see Steven Spielberg direct The Drowned World — as long as he didn’t add any kids to the screenplay. Or Danny Boyle film Concrete Island. Or, for that matter, Wong Kar-wai could film Concrete Island, in Chinese, set in Hong Kong. Or Shanghai — a nice bit of Ballardian symmetry there.

Spielberg? Wow. Interesting answer.

When I say ‘Steven Spielberg’ I really just mean the budgets, and the production values, and the technical abilities — the sets, the matte painting, the look — that went into something like Minority Report, or even the first forty-five minutes of War of the Worlds. I wasn’t thinking of Empire of the Sun at all, in fact. I think The Drowned World starring maybe Daniel Craig and Christian Bale, directed by Steven Spielberg — although I’m just thinking out loud here — might be good. But who knows. It could also be horrific.

Reversing the question, I’d love to see J.G. Ballard write a novelisation of Panic Room — or something else like that. I wonder if he could novelize Die Hard…?

Do you feel that Blade Runner’s an overrated text as far as architectural criticism is concerned? It always gets name checked, but one thing I feel it missed was the ‘invisibility’ of new technology. It’s probably the last of the old-school dystopian sci fi films, where the city itself was a major character, imposing and present…

As an architectural film, yes: I do think Blade Runner is over-rated. Even as a film about urban design or the urban future. But as a film about the overwhelming sadness of being alone in the world – in that regard I think it’s unbelievable, and deserves its reputation. The self-distrusting madness of thought, doubting your own reality, your own solidity, whether or not what you did yesterday was real: all obvious questions, of course, and all themes already done by the Existentialists, the Romantics, even The Matrix – but what I mean is that, in a world where it’s possible to work and grow old and be completely alone for the whole thing, self-disappearance is an interestingly under-explored phenomenon. And I think Blade Runner really tackles that. It’s a sad movie. It can sometimes be almost unbearable to watch.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Ballard once said that the “future will be boring”. From your enthusiastic mapping out of the future on BLDGBLOG, you clearly don’t agree.

Arguably, nothing’s boring — it comes down to whether you’re alert enough to find something of interest. If you’re willing to embarrass yourself expressing unexpected enthusiasms, for instance, then nothing’s ever boring. Weird things happen everywhere if you look for them. The international departure lounge at the Chicago airport, for instance, may sound like the most boring place on earth, but the whole point of the Ballardian project — the whole point of Ballard’s novels — seems to be to reveal the secret currents that exist in such a space: Freudian/sexual interest, Marxist/revolutionary interest, rightwing/Monarchist interest. Whatever interest. So there’s no real way of predicting whether or not the future will be boring. Arguably, the world will be at its most boring once everyone recycles their tins and eats vegetarian. Perhaps manufacturing AK-47s is the only way to liven things up.

I mean, if bird flu and nuclear terrorism and 9.0 earthquakes in the heart of Los Angeles — or even global currency deflation — all come to pass, then the future will be insanely fucking interesting, even exciting. It will be terrifying, obviously — but then the future won’t be boring at all. And, if you believe Ballard, even after the whole world gets turned into an endless highway system there will still be a million things to look forward to. Mega-crashes being only one of them.

It’s through enthusiasm — not anger — that Ballard’s major characters all discover their strange perversions. Crash, for instance, whether I liked the novel or not, is the ultimate example of this: being willing to admit that you’re sexually fascinated by car crashes. It’s not nihilism, after all; it’s falling in love with totally weird shit.

Can you elaborate on this BLDGBLOG statement of yours: “We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard than we do from Le Corbusier?”

Sure. First, that statement should be contextualised a bit. The ‘we’, for instance, was referring to architects and architectural critics, not to mankind, or the human species. Or primates. That said, it was a comment more about genre than it was about Ballard’s, or Le Corbusier’s, own intentions. Whilst Ballard, to my knowledge, would never dream of designing some new urban development in which thousands of people will live — or a new shopping mall — Le Corbusier had a very naive and vaguely imperialistic earnestness, wherein taking his own ideas too seriously, as architecturally realisable plans, was part of the package. That kind of over-self-seriousness, in my opinion, offers very little to learn from. But Ballard also realised — and articulated, in brilliant ways — what constructing huge high-rise apartment blocks, surrounded by empty parkland, would actually accomplish: domestic violence, race-based social segregation, and utterly pointless rivalries between makeshift gangs over everyday services. Le Corbusier either didn’t care and so he designed those buildings anyway, or he assumed that everyone in the world goes home at night — quiet, well-disciplined, educated and middle-class, listening to Schoenberg … which is quite obviously not how everyone lives.

That’s why I think architects should read Ballard. At the very least, his sarcastic reaction to over-earnest housing plans and suburban mega-malls is quite sobering. Along these lines, I’ve often thought that if the evening news included a daily primer about how to live inside modern architecture — what the actual point of modern architecture was; that it had a point, for instance — then more people would be excited by Le Corbusier. Or by Richard Meier. Or even by Norman Foster. If you don’t understand how a certain blank, white wall, with no windows, is supposed to challenge your ideas of domesticity, then you just think it’s a shite design and you want your money back. Constant dissatisfaction with your architectural surroundings becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst, that Ballard is so good at capturing.

The problem with architecture is that it’s still there in the morning; you can’t turn it off. Unless you’ve been stockpiling bombs.

Of course, this is also why I found the youth riots outside Paris last year so interesting — because almost every journalist covering the story began by all but channelling Ballard. You had major international newspapers implying, or even explicitly stating, that the high-rises themselves were to blame. At least one op-ed even specifically cited Le Corbusier, as if he should be tried in court! It goes without saying that many architects found this deeply offensive, and they instead blamed class tension, French racism, etc. And they had a point, obviously — in fact, a very good point — but the idea that buildings are these innocent shells that can do no harm to anyone is a total intellectual failure. Frankly, it insults the power of architecture! Look at supermax prisons, or Guantanamo Bay. Architecture has psychological effects.

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

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J.G. Ballard. High-Rise.
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I’ve long thought Ballard should be taught in architectural schools. How would you design an architectural syllabus based around JGB?

I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine, so who knows. I think it’d be relatively easy, and exciting, to use Concrete Island, for instance, in a course about the history of urban infrastructure. And it’d be hilarious and great to assign chapters from High-Rise to students in a class about public housing, or about Manhattan condo development, or even about the career of Le Corbusier. I would jump at the chance to lead a class like that! Getting urban hydrology designers — engineers of canals and levees — to read The Drowned World. It’d be so much fun — and so incredibly interesting — and the ensuing conversations, I think, would be phenomenal.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Not only do I think more architects should read Ballard but I also think that more Ballard fans should read architectural treatises: Archigram, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, Victor Gruen. I think fans of The Drowned World would be totally blown away by Guy Maunsell’s anti-aircraft towers now rotting away in the Thames estuary; fans of The Day of Creation would be awed by, say, the Great Man-Made River of Libya. Look up Drift Station Bravo. Look up architectural Brutalism. Look up the stock prices of firms in the private security industry. Even Halliburton, or the U.S. Department of Transportation: that’s Ballard’s strange race of highway builders right there. The world is already Ballardian.

Take that whole affair with Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son — a few years ago he tried to lead a private coup in Equatorial Guinea. He’s the perfect Ballardian protagonist: right wing, wealthy, elite schooled, a descendent of what amounts to secular royalty, former owner of a race car firm for god’s sake, and then president of an international business consultancy — but he takes all his money and buys helicopter gunships. It’s like he’d been reading Super-Cannes!

The whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent”.

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J.G. Ballard. Concrete Island.
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The architect is a reoccurring figure in Ballard’s fiction. There’s Anthony Royal in High-Rise who hovers over the inhabitants “like some kind of fallen angel”. Concrete Island’s Robert Maitland is also an architect.

I think a lot of this comes out of an era when the architect was a much more influential figure — a kind of Ayn Rand–like utopian world-engineer. In post-war England, in particular — in a country full of bombed cities and destroyed docklands — the importance of the architect was almost hyperbolically exaggerated. There was a war to recover from, and thus a country to rebuild. I think there was a sense that architects could start the whole world over from scratch. They could literally build the future. Architects had power beyond mere aesthetics or land development strategies.

So everyday people — the people in Ballard’s novels — have the air of being mere spectators and unwilling participants in someone else’s social planning scheme, someone else’s utopia. It wasn’t their fantasy, in other words, but someone else’s, and they had to wake up within it everyday. You see that especially in High-Rise, as you say, with its dandyish architect living on the top floor, training his Alsatians, whilst everyone else, on the floors below, have to put up with the inadequacies of the man’s design.

I think the importance of architects in Ballard’s fiction — or, later, psychiatrists and doctors — is a factor of the time period, to some extent. Who would Ballard write about today? Who’s built our world? I suppose that’s the new obsession with multinational CEOs and their ilk. For what it’s worth, by the way, I think Max Barry’s novels supply an interesting next step, in that regard, after Ballard. Not in every way, of course — but it will be interesting to see where Barry goes.

You once wrote, “just about everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture”…

What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence”.

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J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes.
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Ballard once said, “I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with”. Any thoughts on that?

Well, I agree. People love to see all hell break loose — look at Hurricane Katrina, for instance, which no one wanted to admit they actually wished was much worse. I think there’s a real curiosity now to see an Orwellian world take shape. What would it look like? How would you feel living there? It’s like taking a holiday into another political system — only dystopia is something you may not ever come back from. Perhaps that’s the appeal: the irreversibility of dystopia.

He also waxed lyrical about Michael Manser’s Heathrow Hilton, saying he waits for the day “when the whole of London resembles this future design classic”. Which architects would you commission for the job of rebuilding London, and what would you build (and demolish) first?

I don’t think my answer will sound very appealing to hardcore Ballardians — especially not to Ballard himself — but if I had to rebuild London, I’d probably use some weird combination of Christopher Wren, G.B. Piranesi, Michael Sorkin, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Palladio, John Soane, Norman Foster, Ed Mazria, Peter Zumthor – and, I don’t know, a million others. Whoever designed Angkor Wat. Angkor-Wat-on-Thames. Even some more buildings by A.W. Pugin. I’d build more tunnels, and more pedestrian bridges, and lots of artificial ruins, and I’d throw up hundreds of industrial-gothic warehouses near the Thames foreshore and add stone statuary everywhere. Meanwhile, I’d open a new private space-port in the southeast, near Eltham Palace; you’d watch international space stations take flight over experimental greenhouses and well-designed, leafy suburbs full of affordable housing.

Everyone would hate it.

I think I’m something of a classicist when it comes to London architecture. Or maybe that’s inaccurate — but it’s a beautiful city, and I wouldn’t want Archigram, for instance, or some group of neo-Brutalists, to redesign the place — despite my incredible enthusiasm for both Archigram and Brutalism. Genuinely liking something — an idea, a design — doesn’t mean you have to build it.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Who else? Single Speed Design, from Boston, do amazing, amazing work — and they deserve much more coverage and many more clients. And they’re very modern, not classicists in any way. I like Andrew Maynard, as well, an Aussie, and think he could do some great new flats. Really great, even. I could go on and on. I just like architecture, so it’s probably easier to say who I wouldn’t hire. And Daniel Libeskind would be at the very top of that list. Followed closely by Frank Gehry. Peter Eisenman would also make my blacklist.

I like density, detail, pedestrianised streets and stonework — quite frankly, the exact opposite of a Ballardian world. But I also like tropical gardens — and perhaps a flooded city themepark, in the very center of the city… And who can resist a purpose-built Ballardian labyrinth of concrete motorways?

When all’s said and done, has Ballard made a difference?

It’s hard to say whether Ballard has actually contributed anything — perhaps a deranged enthusiasm for all things suburban? Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’s taken something away: the naive belief that modernity leads to anything other than sexual deviance and violent nationalism or corporate sociopathology. Though I feel like a member of the Taliban, saying something like that.

After all, it’s not a rigorous science we’re talking about here — which is why I think Ballard is so good as a novelist. If he was writing social theory — if he was Malcolm Gladwell — he’d be laughed out of the fucking bookstore. Or is the difference really that the Taliban see modernity and they accuse it of sexual deviance and violent pathology — and so they hate it — while Ballard sees modernity, and he also accuses it of sexual violence and so on, but that’s exactly why he loves it so much? Ballard, we can’t forget, is perhaps suburbia’s biggest fan — not because he likes father-son bonding and family picnics and a good barbecue but because everyone comes out of there completely insane.

The Taliban would nuke the suburbs; Ballard would build more of them. Is that the difference? Perhaps the dichotomy’s false, and I don’t know what I’m talking about — but the politics of Ballard’s enthusiasm are definitely worth discussing at greater length.

Photo by Emiliano Granado. Used with permission.

Can you tell me more about the novel about technology and surveillance you’ve just finished?

Sure. The book follows surveillance camera installation teams around greater London, dropping in on these events they’ve organised, called ‘film nights’ – which is also the name of the book: Film Night.

The two main characters are architects; they went to design school together, and the book begins as they bump into each other more than a decade later at the Barbican. Things have changed. One of them now works as a consultant in private security: he helps London architects make their designs more secure (which means easier to film, basically, using CCTV – designing better lines of sight and so on). Surveillance, in other words, becomes an architectural concern: how easily can this building be filmed? In any case, the guy’s been making short films on the sly, using footage taken from his company’s surveillance cameras, and these are then shown — along with pornos, and car wrecks, and building demolitions, and so on — at the film nights I mentioned. Which almost always take place in abandoned buildings, or in office buildings after they’ve closed down for the day — but always in places patrolled by this guy’s firm. He’s got a key, an access code, a friend on-duty — and so they come back in at night and watch films.

To make a very long story short, then, a larger film project comes along involving the narrator’s newfound acquaintances, and he’s soon helping them make a feature film — without any obvious storyline, using nothing but surveillance cameras, and only cameras that they themselves have installed. Etc. etc. The book is actually quite funny, believe it or not — it probably sounds boring as shit — and it’s short. Full of dialogue. Terrorism, art, surveillance, even some Andy Warhol. Bits of it — little details — are very consciously Ballardian, as you can probably tell. On the other hand, I still have to get the thing published.

Finally, a question that all architecturally minded Ballard fans want answered: does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The angle is just the beginning.

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Many thanks to Tim Chapman, Matt Smith and Joanne Murray for help with the questions.
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..:: LINKS
+ BLDGBLOG
+ Single Speed Design
+ Archigram
+ Superstudio
+ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rem Koolhaas)
+ Victor Gruen
+ Andrew Maynard
+ Emiliano Granado