J.G. Ballard, Il condominio, 2014

An elegant condominium in a residential area, built according to the most advanced technologies, is able to guarantee isolation to its residents but will prove unable to defend them. The London skyscraper of glass and concrete, forty floors high and equipped with a thousand apartments, is the theater of the general relapse into the barbarism of an entire emerging social class. The electricity fails and it is the end of civilization, the metamorphosis from heaven to hell, the birth of rival clans, the green light for massacres and violence. The condominium, with the lower floors intended for the lower classes, and where as you rise in height you rise in the social hierarchy, it turns into a prison for condominiums who, forced to struggle to survive, give free rein to an irrepressible and primal ferocity. “Some time had passed and, sitting on the balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing was reflecting on the singular events that had taken place in that immense condominium over the preceding three months. Now that everything was back to normal, he realized with surprise that not there had been an obvious beginning, a moment beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. With its forty floors and thousands of apartments, the supermarket and swimming pools, the bank and kindergarten. – now in a state of neglect, to tell the truth – the skyscraper could offer opportunities for confrontation and violence in abundance.”