Howl, High Rise and Archigram

This week we read Howl by Allen Ginsberg (1955). The poem is split into three parts, the first of which describes scenes and characters from Ginsberg's colourful life "The best minds of my generation". He waxes about psychopathic friends, musicians, painters, drug users, gays and alcoholics. The final part, as Ginsberg describes, is "a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in all its glory". An ode to his close friend Carl, whom he met in a psychiatric hospital; the word lamb evoking images of the innocent , weak and vulnerable. In part two Carl (and his contemporaries) - the lamb - have been preyed on by "the monster of mental consciousness", they have fallen victim to society and are trapped inside a controlling bureaucratic machine. Ginsberg names this machine Moloch, a metaphor for capitalism and industrial civilization. It is also a word heavy with reference; a hallucination describing a San Francisco hotel with a monstrous facade to which Ginsberg's friends have been sacrificed/ the horror as men are devoured by their work in Fritz Laing's Metropolis (1927)/ a Middle-Eastern god to which children must be sacrificed.

In 1923 Corbusier declared "A house is a machine for living in", architecture would be refined, simplified and made efficiently, as if on a factory production line. Technology would be embraced and function would rule over style. By the 1960s a huge percentage of architecture had been built using Corbusier's model, though often without the finesse or the Utopian ideals that Corbusier had originally intended. Tower blocks meant for the war-homeless working classes were instead filled by the bourgeoisie seeking a contemporary, trendy way of living. Around the same time a new architectural collective in London were forming their own manifesto. Archigram took inspiration from science fiction, consumerism and technology. Their hypothetical projects made an almost literal satire of Corbusier's original "machine" by producing works that glamourised a future machine age where people lived in pods and became electric nomads of great moving cities.

In J.G.Ballard's 1975 High Rise, a perfect tower block is built, it is the epitome of efficient and convenient living. It is so perfect in fact that its residents no longer need to leave and to venture to the outside world for their needs. The high rise becomes inverted and a closed society is formed within its walls. The society soon divides into three warring classes, and violence, murder and deception soon follow. Ballard is trying to "offer a vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology could warp the human psyche in hitherto unexplored ways". He is showing us the frightening possibilities of Archigram and Le Corbusier played out to their full potential. He is taking Ginsberg's tragedy to the next level. (See Doctor Who's 'Paradise Towers', 1987, for an eerie but entertaining view of the Ballardian building and society).

It is now 2009, technology has come a thousand times further than it was in Ginsberg's or Ballard's time. How much longer before we all start falling victim to the machine, both physically and metaphorically. Has it already started? We have been warned...