Ben Wheatley’s latest, High-Rise, offers a grim and grisly (faux-)reality of twentieth-century modernist visions of urban communal living. This adaption, which has a more structured plot than J. G. Ballard’s novel, follows protagonist Dr Robert Laing during his first three months living in the eponymous high rise – a brutalist London tower block that pierces the sky like a giant fish-hook. Both the novel and the film are bookmarked by scenes of Laing living in squalor and chaos in one of the higher floors of the building. As Will Self (in a piece for New Statesman) puts it, the framing of the novel is ‘nicely encapsulated’ by the book’s opening line:

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

But how did it come to this? While there are certainly echoes of Lord of the Flies, the 1975 novel is more than just a psychotic episode of human interaction and degeneration. It is directly inspired by so-called ‘experiments’ in urban communal living that were popular in London from the 1930s to the 1970s. These, in turn, were inspired by the the architecture of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect and pioneer of what we would now call modern architecture.

Today if you visit Hampstead Heath, within a five minute walk from the Underground station you can find two sites (now managed by the National Trust) – the Isokon Building and 2 Willow Road – which are some of the earliest examples of modernist development in the city. The former was constructed by Jack and Molly Pritchard along with architect Wells Coates, who envisioned it as an affordable, communal space – a kind of liberal-minded haven – within the confines of a rapidly expanding and increasingly inaffordable metropolis. Apartment space was small, with very little living space, but on the ground floor there was a communal kitchen and dining area. The Prichards hoped that residents (which included themselves) would pitch in together at mealtimes, eventually breaking down in spirit any physical boundaries between occupants of the Isokon Building. Wheatley’s High-Rise demonstrates the same communal ideals: throughout the film we encounter an internal gym, swimming pool and even supermarket, all designed to bring the tower’s occupants together.

Unfortunately, the experiment was short-lived. Though intended as socialist ideal, the Isokon Building was partially funded by the commercial success of Jack Pritchard’s follow-up project: the Isokon Company, which dealt in high end interior design. The Isokon Company gave rise to, amongst a number of classic modernist designs, the Isokon recliner chair – a template that companies like Ikea still use today. But during World War 1 the company folded, and as a result the Pritchards could no longer afford to support the upkeep and maintenance of the building. In 1969 the building was sold and from the 1970’s onwards gradually deteriorated.The problem of funding the upkeep of urban communal developments, which were supposed to remain affordable for residents, is likewise reflected in Wheatley’s High-Rise. Soon after Dr Laing moves into the tower, power shortages hamper the lower floors of the building, and by the end of the film the same floors are wall-to-wall with undisposed-of rubbish.

The Isokon Building has, however, now been re-opened with an adjacent gallery recounting its history while the flats are once again occupied by residents. Today, most of the building’s occupants are key workers (social workers, state school teachers, nurses and so on) housed by a partially-state governed benefit scheme. So, in a sense, the liberal-mindedness of the Pritchards lives on in the building. It seems unlikely that any such fate will greet the film’s High-Rise, whose residents simply adapt to the grim deterioration of the building. There is very little indication that anyone has even considered moving out.

The second of Hampstead’s modernist buildings is 2 Willow Road (composed of three terraced houses), just around the corner. It was completed in 1939 from a design by architect Erno Goldfinger, who is said to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Bond villain of the same name. Fleming was a resident of the area and, like a number of local residents, strongly opposed the site’s development. Upon completion, Goldfinger moved into the building himself with his wife and family and lived there until his death in 1987. Goldfinger is by all accounts the template for High-Rise’s Anthony Royale (played with no shortage of regality by Jeremy Irons in Wheatley’s adaptation), the architect of the cluster of high rise towers depicted in the film. Royale claims that he envisions his building as a “crucible for change” and a “paradigm” for future developments. Goldfinger, likewise, was a visionary and, like the Pritchards, hoped to usher in a new era of London development and living – reversing the tide of poorly designed, uninspiring developments that were, for many, making London a thoroughly unenjoyable place to live.

But was there any hope for the ambitions of men like Goldfinger and Royale? Would it ever have been possible to create affordable housing in the confines of one of the world’s largest and most over-crowded cities? And crucially, would it ever have been possible to live the idealistic lifestyle envisioned by such modernist developers? High-Rise certainly suggests that there was no such hope. Within weeks of Dr Laing’s arrival, Royale’s brutalist utopia has turned into the stuff of nightmares. The lower floors of the building are decimated by power failures and excess waste that cannot be disposed of, while the occupants of the upper floors – the building’s literally higher classes – live the life of pre-revolutionary French fancies (including a period-themed party), quickly diminishing the community’s resources. Is there any basis for these extreme prophecies of failure?

Ballard wrote the novel in the middle of the 1970s,  by which time brutalist architecture had already lost significant favour and the popularity of urban communal living had plummeted. Furthermore, as if to emphasise the point, in 1968 Ronan Point, a 22-storey high rise tower and social housing project in Newham, collapsed, killing 4 inhabitants and leaving 17 injured. The Ronan Point disaster significantly dented public and governmental faith in high rise accommodation. Ballard would no doubt have been somewhat, if not directly, aware of this spectacular failure of urban communal architecture. Yet, Ballard must also have intended his novel to serve as a warning. In 1968, the same year that Ronan Point collapsed, Erno Goldfinger’s most famous endeavour, the Balfron Tower in Poplar (his very own High-Rise),was completed. Again, it was conceived as a beacon for the future of social housing.

Ben Wheatley’s 2016 adaptation interestingly situates itself in a similar time period to when Ballard was writing and thus – unlike Ballard’s dystopian prophecy – takes a retrospective approach, although one gets the impression that Wheatley is attempting to make a forward-looking 1970s-placed adaptation; for example, at one point Dr Laing, played by Tom Hiddleston, asks ‘do you ever feel like you’re living in a future that’s already happened?’

Ballard’s prophecy is made more interesting by the fact that ten years later (in 1985), Alice Coleman published the infamous findings of her research into post-war social housing developments of London boroughs like Southwark and Tower Hamlets, entitled Utopia on Trial. Coleman, a geographer and sociologist at King’s College London (today an Emeritus Professor), examined a number of urban developments across the city, with a particular emphasis on design features such as number of storeys and number of flats in each housing block. Coleman’s controversial findings were that insufficient attention was paid to social factors in cases of urban and communal living. In a relatively recent interview with New Statesman, she explains that she was forced to conclude that “Bad urban planning…was the primary cause of crime.” The article further describes how:

“While writing Utopia on Trial she was commissioned by Westminster Council to apply her ideas to the Mozart estate [just one of many urban estates examined]. Her first act was to tear down four overhead walkways. The police told her the burglary rate went down 55 per cent.”

Coleman’s findings, though controversial, were (if they were to believed) fascinating, and offer a clue as to why experiments in urban communal living failed and, further, suggest that Ballard was on to something with his dystopian vision of the High-Rise. The building itself is at the very centre of the film’s tale, and almost serves as a character in its own right. Coleman’s famous research is realised in the dark humour of Ben Wheatley’s adaptation, and the scenes of mass-crime, hysteria, hedonism and carnage that ensue.The use of a Margaret Thatcher soundbite at the film’s conclusion is also telling. Coleman had close ties with Thatcher. In fact, it’s said that 1986 it to took Coleman only thirty minutes to procure from her a £50 million contract to redesign several ‘problem estates’ across London.

The take-away message of Coleman’s findings is that, like all animals, humanity’s habitat is crucial. Within the confines of heavily concreted structures that take their residents further and further away from the earth, it is exceedingly difficult to live happily, and impossible to live the modernist utopian ideal. Coleman, Wheatley and Ballard, though they differ greatly in method and presentation, all latch on to this important proposition and – regardless of whether they are accurate or simply overly pessimistic about future development (after all, in an increasingly overpopulated world we may just have to find a way to live ‘unnaturally’) – their ‘findings’, in all cases, are stark and fascinating.