"For some time now he had known he was developing a powerful phobia about the high-rise. He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of power running for the building, almost as if [the architect] had deliberately designed his body be held within their grip. At night as he lay beside his sleeping wife, he would often wake from an uneasy sleep into the suffocating bedroom, conscious of each of the 999 other apartments pressing on the walls and ceiling, forcing the air from his chest."
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High-Rise (novel)
High-Rise is a 1975 novel by J.G. Ballard about a London tower block whose affluent residents, after all the apartments are rented, gradually descend into barbarism, vandalizing the building and remaining in it all day and forming groups to violently attack other floors and defend their own. In 2015 it was adapted into a film directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller and Jeremy Irons
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