Geoff Manaugh on Ballard

I invited Geoff Manaugh of the BLDGBLOG to share his thoughts about Ballard on Omnivoracious--and I'm glad I did. It's fascinating stuff, and it begins to get at some of the reasons I love Ballard's work. Much of how he rewires minds is how he approached the idea of space and architecture.Here's a short excerpt:"Among other things, what makes Ballard's fiction so spatially valuable is that he explores the psychological implications of everyday non-places--like parking lots, high-rise apartment towers, highway embankments, shopping malls, well-policed corporate enclaves, and even British suburbia--without resorting to the flippant condemnation one might expect. Instead, Ballard describes these spaces in terms of their effects: how they mutate and rearrange the mental lives of their inhabitants...It's as if these buildings, malls, empty plazas, and parking lots do, in fact, inspire a new type of humanity--as modernism's high priests once predicted--but Ballard shows that what they are bringing into existence is something altogether darker and unexpected. In other words, our contemporary built landscape has not ushered in the enlightened utopia once promised by Le Corbusier, for instance, with his isolated towers, or by Mies van der Rohe with his unornamented glass boxes. Instead, there is a slow-burning psychopathy here, a dementia inspired by space itself."