The case study pairing deliberately stages two extremes in the fortunes of the highrise idea. Within these case studies, the following two highrise buildings have been investigated in detail:

• Britain: 213/183/153 Petershill Drive, Red Road (scheduled for demolition 2008) [image_1]
• Singapore: Bukit Ho Swee (one of the earliest developments) [image_2]

The sensibility of this research project has been to resist being taken up by the certainty of the historical narrative that positions the highrise simply as a housing failure. It does so not because it seeks to make a case for high density, highrise living per se but in order to dislodge the dominance of a reductive and Eurocentric historical narrative and to challenge the narrowness of existing evaluative frameworks. These have worked in unison to ensure that aspects of highrise living (both in so-called failed contexts, as well as so-called successful contexts) have been misunderstood, overlooked, even forgotten.

Following a heuristic model from studies of science and technology the two cases studies in this project offer an example of the technological ‘success’ and the technological ‘failure’. In successful technologies the socio-technical associations that hold them together are so seamlessly enmeshed they are ‘invisible’ (the technology becomes a ‘black box’). But in failed or failing technologies previously invisible associations are, through the course of action of failure, revealed. We might think here of Law and Callon’s [1] study of the ‘life and death of an aircraft’. In that research the authors demonstrate how studying a technology that fails allows one to detect how ‘objects, artefacts, and technical practices come to be stabilized’ [2]. Indeed Callon goes so far as to assert that the concept of truth (or non-truth) needs to be replaced by that of success or failure [3].