The Measures Taken

A history of Vermilion Sands

‘A Place where I would be happy to live’
There are many agglomerations of people in the works of JG Ballard that could, at a stretch, be called ‘communities’ – the linear city on the French Riviera that provides the setting for Super-Cannes’ settlement of Eden-Olympia, the similar Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights, the docklands luxury flats of the eponymous High-Rise. It’s almost axiomatic that these groups of people are veering fast towards a technolgised atavism, a state of nature that enables their inhabitants to fulfil their desires and inhabit myths. Community, with the fraternity and commonality that suggests, if it even exists in Ballard, is embodied best by the opening of High-Rise, where someone is calmly eating their neighbour’s dog.



Sometimes the existing world might be infused with some sudden utopian spirit, as in The Crystal World, or the transformation of Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company. However there is only one instance of a speculative community approaching a Ballardian ideal – a site where we definitively leave the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the cautionary, anti-Modernist dystopia – and that is in Vermilion Sands. This is a 1971 collection of stories spanning his first published story, ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956) to 1970, all set in the same community: a dead or dying desert resort, populated entirely by the elegantly, wanly idle, most of whom are involved in strangely calm psychodramas. Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments. It is, as Ballard writes in the 1971 introduction, a picture of an ideal he wanted and expected to see realised. The dystopian tradition is refuted in this introduction: ‘very few attempts (in SF) have been made to visualise a unique and self-contained future that contains no warnings to us. Perhaps because of this cautionary tone, so many of science fiction’s notional futures are zones of unrelieved grimness.’ So could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?



In positing an actual, liveable future utopia that is eminently possible, Ballard was, consciously or otherwise, participating in a lineage of ideal radiant cities that pervaded Modernist architects and theorists of the early 20th century. One of the most fascinating of Vermilion Sands’ unacknowledged progenitors is the German Expressionist poet, Science Fiction novelist and Architectural enthusiast Paul Scheerbart. Before his death in 1915 Scheerbart had created a distinctive world populated by jet-setting architects, the denizens of high fashion and innovative engineers, using the emancipatory technolgies developed in the 1900s to delineate an idyllic future rather than the dystopia of technologised war so frequently seen by his contemporary H.G Wells. These technologies themselves would affect the writing itself. In a prefiguring of Ballard’s use of medical and scientific textbooks, Scheerbart would adopt the tone and content of an engineering treatise or an architectural textbook. His most famous work, Glasarchitektur, would in fact find favour as an unusually technically precise analysis of the possibilities and practicalities of glass construction. Glass was Scheerbart’s obsession, waking the population from their stone-induced slumber and their pompous, bourgeois Victoriana by housing them a glittering crystal world of refracted coloured glass, which evokes the fragile, brittle crystals and chemical colours that overtake the natural world in the short story ‘The Illuminated Man’ and in the subsequent crystal worlds.

Blue Veils and Golden Sands
The most proto-Ballardian of Paul Scheerbart’s novels might be his 1913 work The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent White, the title of which refers to the recommended colours to be worn in a building constructed of coloured glass. The novel’s concerns are with glass architecture, haute couture and the activities of a mid-20th century leisure-class jetset. Its protagonist, Krug, is an architect on his honeymoon with attendant flying machine, a Wilhelmine precursor of Ballard’s numerous aviators and architects. In the midst of his travels he designs Chicago highrises, a retirement complex for air chauffeurs (something one could well imagine in Vermilion Sands), and engineers a train bridges to criss-cross Indian zoos, the owners of which he impresses upon the importance of advertising. The Grey Cloth takes place in a mediatised landscape of determined triviality, where the protagonist’s wife’s sartorial choices become headline news, yet it is also a world seemingly without poverty, without class conflict, and without any restriction on mobility and leisure. Perhaps nearest to something approximating ‘action’ here is provided by the film crew that follow Herr Krug and attempt to make from his exploits some sort of commercial picture. Scheerbart’s crystalline future is devoid of the po-facedness of serious SF: there is a gentle irony in the very dialogue-heavy proceedings, as well as a seductiveness and langour that sometimes contradicts somewhat with his cutely Edwardian ‘magnificent men in their flying machines’ tendencies. Nonethless, everything is distinctly civilised: the myths and desires that always lie behind the surface in Ballard are distinctly absent. Freud hasn’t made his appearance yet in Scheerbart’s future.



Scheerbart had the immediate effect on actual architectural practice that he evidently wanted. Soon after the publication of Glasarchitektur and The Grey Cloth he collaborated with the architect Bruno Taut on a little fragment of the glass future, a pavilion for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. This multifaceted, multicoloured glass house prefigured the psychotropic houses of Vermilion Sands, being specifically designed for clashing refractions and reflections, with a kaleidoscope and a waterfall provided inside to interact with the movements and perceptions of the inhabitants. After Scheerbart’s death, Taut initiated the Glaserne Kette (usually translated as the Crystal Chain) in memorial to Scheerbart, as a corresponding society of radical architects – though this was done in secret, as if to avoid the mediascape that Scheerbart blithely presents. The structures promised by the Glaserne Kette resemble living creatures of glass and flesh, such as in the extraordinary organic-artificial creations of Hermann Finsterlin: one can’t imagine this building as static, but as a pulsing, responsive thing.



The theorists of the Crystal Chain were also advocates of a decentred town planning, eradicating the centralised city and diffusing it across a wide space and low density: suburbanisation, although they would have denied it. Their ideas, if not their bulging, organic, fantastical forms, would be continued by the theorists of the ‘linear city’ in the 1920s and 30s. The most famous of these is Le Corbusier’s 1935 tract The Radiant City. The Radiant City’s locations resemble in many respects the heat haze and abstraction of the Vermilion Sands topography. Its aphoristic, oblique and at times somewhat crazed chapters defer to ‘our dictator, the sun’, and posit a society in which the filling of leisure time would be the most pressing issue. His proposals in this book, such as the curvaceous reconstruction of Algiers into a resort city of sun-terraces and snaking white concrete blocks are far from his reputation as propogator of the windswept tower block: The Radiant City is instead a basically Mediterranean, sun-worshipping society of semi-idle technocrats, sportsmen, aviators and starlets.



Perhaps one of the most thorough stabs at constructing this was in Brasilia. This, the new capital city planned for Brazil, planned and designed by former Le Corbusier collaborators Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, is almost exactly contemporary with the Vermilion Sands stories, having been started in 1958 and completed in 1970. The picture of it that one gets from Niemeyer’s memoirs of this Radiant City is of an organic yet decidedly techno-fetishist ex nihilo city being imposed upon the desert: his memories of its design and construction devoted mainly to convivality, drinking and the romancing of beautiful and mysterious women. The parallels here are fairly obvious, and accordingly Brasilia is namechecked in stories like ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ and in the Vermilion Sands stories. The desert has always held a semi-mystical role in Ballard: 'they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time.' Brasilia's desert utopia would come to inadvertently epitomise 'brazilification': the process whereby the rich and the poor become so fissured that they almost seem to be living in different worlds altogether.

Systems of Romance
I’ve just been outlining how Ballard’s Vermilion Sands stories sit in a lineage of Modernism, of forward movement towards an ideal future, as opposed to backwards into the techno-primal that one is more accustomed to. However Vermilion Sands is the Radiant City after all this heroic construction and creation has long since been completed, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of comfortable stagnancy. Extraordinary things happen in it, but always somehow in hock to the past: cloud-sculptors in flying machines reproduce old master paintings in the sky, the singing sculptures and musical plants play Beethoven or, if they’re feeling a little outre, Schoenberg, and films are meldings together of long-forgotten midcentury classics and Greek myths. This sense of repitition and familiarity extends to the names of the protagonists: the overambitious film director is called Orson, while flitting through it we have a Van Eyck, a Chanel, a Cunard: the names echo the great artists of early Modernity, the couturiers of the Paris leisure class and the cruise ship heiresses and Modernist poets of the 1920s, setting up an irrestible world of ease and glamour, but one in which nothing will ever really happen again, much as the mythical power of the stars that populate the 60s mediascape of The Atrocity Exhibition have no contemporary analogue.



This is enabled nicely by having the stories take place during and after ‘the Recess’, an unexplained period in which the world seemingly stood still, presumably with production reaching a point whereby it could stop and be replaced with a more ludic existence: ‘Prima Belladonna’ describes it as: ‘that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer, which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years.’ Within it one merely plays at working, pretending to be architects or sculptors while spending one’s time playing ‘a sort of decelerated chess’ and embarking on affairs in the desert heat. In the context of this Baudrillard-esque ‘events strike’, myth starts to creep back in, with Freudian fantasies both Oedipal and Orphic becoming the models for the faded gods and goddesses that reside in this outpost of the linear city. There is still plenty of sex and death here, yet it never impacts on the community, unlike in his other settlements. The crises stay resolutely private, as if the suburban low density lowers its tensions and its seeming absence of an outside, and of work stripping away anything but benignly if half-heartedly creative community.



The Recess is mentioned elsewhere in the story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, perhaps the most perfectly compressed of the Vermilion Sands stories. One of the more precisely drawn of these echoes that purport to be artists is the architect Miles Vanden Starr, more than likely a conceptual outgrowth of Mies van der Rohe: whose distinctly Scheerbartian fixation with glass created the glass box aesthetic of the International Style, although this had an early element of dreamlike Expressionism, as in the early project for a glass skyscraper you can see here. The narrator, as always in Vermilion Sands in the first person, has just moved into a psychotropic house with his wife. He finds that the house is still so suffused with the personalities of the previous inhabitants that he is able to communicate with them, or at least have some sort of communion with them, to the point where the obsession destroys his marriage. ‘Vanden Starr’ was married to an actress who, most likely, killed him. The architect’s presence is stern, making the house contract and repulse its new inhabitant. The building itself is like a Crystal Chain fantasy gone to seed, become picturesquely ruined, described thus: ‘screened from the road by a mass of dusty rhododendrons, it consisted of six aluminum shelled spheres suspended like the elements of a mobile from an enormous concrete davit. The largest sphere contained the lounge, the others, successively smaller and spiralling upwards into the air, the bedrooms and kitchen. Many of the hull plates had been holed, and the entire slightly tarnished structure hung down into the weeds poking through the cracked concrete court like a collection of forgotten spaceships in a vacant lot.’



What we have here is remarkably close to the contemporary perception of Modernism’s remnants as a sort of graveyard of failed utopias. This is a topic Ballard has, in a manner true to his Surrealist roots, always been rather ambiguous about. His hero Dali was always derisive about the Corbusian radiant city – he had irked him in the 1930s by stating that his ideal architecture would be ‘soft and hairy’. Last year Ballard wrote ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camoflage, and I regret that no-one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery. All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, Corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature.’



This reads much like an admission of defeat, seeing as previously, most particularly in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard had succeeded in an eroticisation of the abstract and cold geometries of Modernist and specifically brutalist architecture: at one point, 'Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomise the Festival Hall?' However in Vermilion Sands Ballard, amongst other things, manages to imagine a Modernism that is capable of particularly extreme illusion and emotion, and that can easily enough adapt itself to its inhabitants’ fixations, fantasies and psychopathologies. Vermilion Sands, for all its idyllic, heady beauty, is in this respect of a piece with the supposedly more cautionary Ballard, as he stressed in an interview with David Pringle, there was no disjunction 'between Vermilion Sands on the one hand, and the rest of my work on the other': it's another exemplar of technology creating a guilt-free psychopathology: only here it is a benign, controlled pathology.



However we need to look elsewhere to see what it is that causes the unambiguously seductive qualities of Vermilion Sands to veer off into the horrors of Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes or the Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights. These are all more or less the same place: the linear city stretching the French Riviera which Ballard describes in his introduction to Vermilion Sands, enclaves of the hypertechnolgical populated by the more or less idle rich. The Vermilion Sands stories are a dream of what Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘The Golden Age’, the postwar burst of Welfare, leisure, consumption and culture, the Keynesian technocracy that would crash in the mid 1970s. The Vermilion Sands imagined in the 1950s and 60s has no poor, but they are present on the outside of Estrella de Mar or Eden-Olympia of the 1990s. The inhabitants know it, and are perfectly prepared to use the surrounding immigrant population as fodder for their entertainment much as they might have used the psychotropic houses and singing statues of the faded desert city of the previous future. The most striking similarity is in the sense of a time both stood still and siezed by overwhelming technical advance. In that, Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse is both Modernism’s fulfilment and its repudiation, and Vermilion Sands, for all that it says of the leisure society that the post-Golden Age generations have been denied, is not so far from our present.