In the Singaporean context, a specific worry emerged around the increased incidence of a new and spectacular mode of suicide in which victims jumped from the heights of their newly built housing estates. How, in all this rage for modernity, might a socio-psychic phenomenon like ‘the highrise leap’, as it became known, be accounted for? This spectacular mode of suicide produced specific difficulties for a state trying to impress upon its citizens, and the rest of the world, that it was a modernization success story. Concern around ‘the highrise leap’ generated a good deal of sensational and expert story-making. From the outset, the investigations of the highrise leap were conducted in a way that sought to assess whether there was an explicit causal link between modernization and the highrise built form that was becoming its most quotidian expression, and the increased incidence of leaping.