Could living in the sky subtly influence our perspective of space, distance, and height?
"Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, perhaps even slightly mad." So declares the protagonist (rather presciently, a producer of television documentaries) of J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise, a dystopian fable, set in a tall luxury building outside central London, whose rational architecture and enveloping all-mod-cons embrace cannot ultimately contain the social rot within. Ballard, the self-declared cartographer of "inner space," diagnosed the maladies of this "small vertical city," whose residents "thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed." Here was a vast machine "designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation." It was "civil inattention"—the sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase for the way people cohabiting dense environments studiously ignore each other—run amok.
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