“Later, as he sat on the 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”

- Opening lines of Highrise, by JG Ballard.

JG Ballard, who died today, was one of my favourite writers.

It is not entirely surprising that this English author straddling science fiction, dystopian lit and surrealism should strike a chord with a generation coming of age amidst the embers of the former USSR.

In Ballard’s novels, objects suddenly take on meanings and applications very different to those intended by their usually utopian planners and designers.

In this way, a high rise apartment building promising futuristic easy living descends into a morass of primal violence. Doctors and executives become killers, elevators travelling mortuaries, stairwells stalking grounds. In some respects, this represents the triumph of the buildings’ and objects’ essences over the plans of their creators. Is it only a matter of time until every elevator, every swimming pool, every parking lot, defaults to its inherent, structural promise of violence?

Jeff Manaugh, architecture-philosopher and curator of BLDGBLOG, nails down Ballard’s aesthetic:

“Ballard deals with “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…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”.

In a darkly poignant reward for their obsession with literature, it was precisely the newly-ex-Soviet citizens waking up on the morning of Thursday, December 26 1991 who were destined to live out Ballard’s novels.

What happens when overnight, familiar objects and rituals become denatured? And what happens when objects get given meanings at odds with their original purpose?

Ballard himself never consciously used Soviet or post-Soviet motifs in his fiction, telling Zinovy Zinik that “I haven’t referred to the Soviet experience… because I’ve never been there, and chiefly because I’ve been more interested in the latent pathology of the consumerist West, which is where the entire planet seems to be heading.

And yet, in his focus on those questions, Ballard’s books are at least as important to understanding modern Russia and its psychology as any report from the Carnegie Russia Center.

JG Ballard
15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009