In 1979 The Cloud Club, a swanky members-only dinner club at the three very top floors of the Chrysler Building, closed after fifty years under the pressures of the city’s fiscal crisis. It had been famous for serving grapefruits that were twice the normal size. After that, the cramped views through those triangular windows and the peculiar curved profiles up in the tip made the building’s top floors hard to rent. They sat empty until the canted walls and low ceilings were discovered by an unglamorous profession indifferent to distant vistas, and for whom working hunched over and closer to the floor was not a drawback: dentists.

There are no dentists in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, much of which takes place at a lofty and ethereal architecture studio in the Chrysler Building’s tip. But at the start of the film’s third act Adam Driver, playing an inventor–architect commissioned by the feds to run something called the Design Authority, does get shot in the head. Straight through his right eye, while he’s seated in the back of his ancient yet still futuristic-coded 1970s Citroen DS. An urchin in a puffy newsie cap does the wet work—rather like the kid who ended Omar in The Wire. Which means we do get to see, bared of its flesh, all of Adam Driver’s substantial right cheekbone, jaws, and not least his very many very white teeth. Plus gruesomely scorched eye socket, before they all get knit back together by magical and somehow alive fibers of his invention: megalon. Rhymes with nylon, described as some kind of recycled polymers—that is, plastic. Which substance, in real life, because of the nature of its molecular bonds does indeed last forever but can only be durably reformed for one additional use cycle after original manufacture, and so is not in fact recyclable in the way that those far more wondrous materials, wood and metal and glass, will forever be.

Despite its visible seams and stitches—rather less effective than those applied with megalon to Adam Driver’s beautiful face, and provided by title cards and voiceover narration, heavy in the early going, by Laurence Fishburne—the film’s plot is elusive and episodic. Following Driver as a still-youngish Robert Moses type, if Robert Moses was played by Dan Doctoroff playing Adrien Brody playing a pre-Heat Al Pacino, it’s all sort of a mash-up of Chinatown—gangstery skullduggery around City Hall, to do with the construction of Driver’s titular 100-acre urban renewal project, Megalopolis, somewhere around what is today Hell’s Kitchen and Hudson Yards—and a classics-seminar riff on an actual episode in ancient Roman history, the Catilinarian Conspiracy of the year 63 BC. Which was a complicated maneuver between patricians and plebeians that preceded the rise of Julius Caesar. Which reinforces all available clichés about America as recapitulating the rise and fall of Rome as republic and empire. These are further reinforced by trite quotations from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, despite those being written a very busy hundred years after Cataline and Cicero. Adam Driver says things like, “I reserve my time for people who can think about science, literature, and art,” and, “There’s so much to accomplish but is there time?” He is called Cesar, though this has only an aural association with Gaius Julius Augustus and all his scandalous cousins. The word “megalopolis” dates in English to the 1830s but later acquired a specific meaning to describe the vast blurry sprawl city that effectively stretches from Baltimore to Boston. Beside such a conurbation, a hundred acres in west Midtown is not a city—in all the Whitmanesque complexity and plurality of cities—but merely a rather big building.

The movie’s New York stand-in—“New Rome,” of course—looks, to a litigable extent, like Baz Luhrmann’s New York as presented in his dark, glittering, airless remake of The Great Gatsby. There’s also the usual rain and neon—and anachro-futurist artifacts like that Citroen DS—from Bladerunner. From Metropolis, the epochal 1927 Weimar Germany Fritz Lang silent science-fiction production, there is a vision of a vast and vertical city with a steep hierarchy between the dispossessed below and the idle rich above, in which scientists and engineers and designers eventually provide technocratic solutions that forestall political revolution after disaster. (In Metropolis, a flood; in Megalopolis an old Soviet satellite that rather tastelessly lands at the spot that in our timeline is called Ground Zero—actual footage of which features in the montage that closes out the film.) As in Metropolis, Megalopolis features hallucinations from the point of view of the protagonist: a factory as the ancient god Moloch in the former, generic drugged-out crazy shit in the latter. The inventor figure has a dead wife whom he summons into an afterlife: in Megalopolis, she shows up as hallucinations or holograms or perhaps woven into magic megalon itself; in Metropolis, in the far more alluring proto-C3PO form of the Maschinenmensch.

The other movie this one is built out of is of course The Fountainhead, the 1949 King Vidor picture starring Gary Cooper as manly architect Howard Roark, with a screenplay written by Ayn Rand after her own ponderous 1943 novel. From The Fountainhead, Megalopolis inherits the false cultural persona of the architect as a necessarily isolated genius: a lone cowboy or nocturnal superhero fighting for truth and beauty against the forces of conformity and mediocrity and criminality. Which are generally represented by the press, the politicians, the bankers, the rootless cosmopolites, and other usual suspects. This pernicious depiction of the architect has had the peculiar and enduring effect of leeching into the real world: by disguising dumbassery as badassery, by providing a legible persona for a specific kind of would-be celebrity “design authority” (such as, say, the art director Thomas Heatherwick or the architect Bjarke Ingels), to play act at a singular heroism and—so very falsely—at mere genius. As in The Fountainhead, architecture is mistaken for an inherently and independently worthwhile art form, rather than what it is, which is merely a contingent action of public service undertaken through the observant stewardship of the built environment as found.

---

The well-publicized meta-narrative of Megalopolis’s making inoculates it against any conventional criticism of its text as a notionally freestanding artifact. The film is the long-delayed expression of musings and false starts that date back to 1977. We are told that its director sold some $100 million worth of his vineyards—only a third of his reported fortune—to personally pay for production in the absence of more conventional corporate financing. And we know that the director is aged 85, and so this venture can fall into what is very traditionally called Late Work: a received category in which the artist is paradoxically indulged for reprising and rehashing bits and pieces of the old hits, and admired for showing any flashes of experimentation, however cynical or tentative. In a complex denial of, and defense against conscious knowledge of, our own forthcoming senescence and death, we filmgoers get to—perhaps are meant to—feel a satisfying combination of awe and condescension: The old man’s still got it. There’s so much to accomplish, but is there time?

Well, it helps to have land in Napa to sell. One is tempted, as a thought experiment, to imagine a late-work performance piece in which Coppola, instead of producing this artifact, used his real estate proceeds to build accessible housing, perhaps somewhere in the Bay Area. Back-of-envelope math suggests 500 units in, say, fancy San Jose, or as many as 5000 homes in Oakland. He almost has it in him: the finest legacy of Megalopolis may be the All-Movie Hotel in Peachtree City, Georgia, a former Days Inn that he bought for $4.5 million in 2022 as production headquarters for the film, and now remains as a local boutique hotel—part of a Coppola chain with properties in Italy and Belize—with its screening room and technical facilities serving local creators and filmmakers as a community crossroads and cultural catalyst. Call it Micropolis.

Just as Francis Ford Coppola eventually did make his movie instead of more directly helping people, so does Adam Driver within that movie succeed in making his urban renewal complex in Midtown. It looks like a kelp forest with computer-generated sparkle. It also looks like 2024 AI shit. There is no architecture there to review. There are moving sidewalks. Adam Driver remarks that all residents are only one five-minute transparent-sphere-ride from any number of pocket parks. Whether this coincides with residents’ actual needs or wants is unaddressed. But they do get to return from their under-construction exile to the Bronx? Everything about the depicted architecture of this development, and about the role of the architect in its manifesting, is catastrophically wrong. For many other endeavors depicted onscreen, this wouldn’t matter—who cares if our received ideas of astronauts or archaeologists were mostly invented by the movies?—but the enduring harm done by The Fountainhead shows that, in the absence of what should be a far greater public literacy about the design and production of architecture and the built environment—the movie you can never leave—cinematic portrayals are insidiously influential.

The Megalopolis development is untrue to both best practices in the real world and diagetically incapable of the virtues it’s meant to have in the fake world of the film. It’s wrong because it’s pretty and extraordinary. (It has these characteristics because it has to stand out on film, against the pointedly cloudy murk of the existing Midtown.) The look of Megalopolis appears significantly influenced by the architect Neri Oxman—formerly faculty at the Media Lab at the Architecture School at MIT, founder of a sub-lab wittily called Mediated Matter, and briefly famous in the civilian world for having purportedly dated the well-known architecture enthusiast Brad Pitt—who, after various other production designers and art directors were fired, became a consultant to the film. Oxman, in the late 2010s, was part of a fashionable movement in architecture called biophilic or biomimetic design. At best, this was an ingenious materials science in which the low carbon impact of renewable materials like wood was notionally brought further downstream into the built environment: What if we didn’t kill trees before we started living in them? There’s a lively body of research into what mushrooms, especially, can do to replace concrete, or, more creepily, what the DNA of silkworms or moths might do when harvested and manipulated to human ends. We like this because it makes us feel that if buildings were more like plants or animals, then all the things we humans make could more be part of blameless nature, not of the culture of fossil burning, undercompensated labor, and hostile and carceral design that constitutes so much of what we have built into the planet over the last 400 years. In an early demonstration of a Megalopolis prototype, a canopy grows immediately over a passing pedestrian—like the leaf over Jonah’s head in the Bible story, like a train arriving right on time. Cool, no?

But also, the pedestrian has no choice whether the leaf comes and goes. The moral hazard is that we are encouraged into a fantasy that a living built environment has a consciousness—that, Gaia-like, cares for us—instead of merely representing the top-down will of the designer: an especially flowery version of the familiar way that autocracy tends to present as technocracy. “What goes there?” asks Driver’s admiring girlfriend as they survey Megalopolis mid-construction. “A small stadium,” he answers, “with a roof like gold tissues.” Gold tissues sound neat, I guess? But what matters most is it’s Driver who answers what goes there, rather than the users and dwellers. Today, the world’s best architects—such as Burkina Faso’s Diébédo Francis Kéré, France’s Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Mexico’s Rozana Montiel—are not lone wolves flexing for their girlfriends, but something closer to bottom-up community organizers: deep communicators embedding in the communities in which they are hosts or guests. The thrilling results are humane architectures of subtle but radical transformation—as when Lacaton and Vassal updated a Bordeaux housing project by adding a new layer of balconies and rooms to old buildings, like a new-grown layer of silvery birchbark, achieved with residents never having to move out during construction. Or as when Montiel noticed how children had already turned an obsolete open sewage viaduct in Zacatecas into a playground, and simply fulfilled their innocent ingenuity by upcycling the sewer with an installation that turned an infrastructural margin into a community center. Nobody had their home knocked down. Nobody was temporarily exiled to the Bronx. Nobody had to, as if all the world was LaGuardia, endure a moving sidewalk.

“Artists control time,” the same admiring girlfriend says to Driver, like “how architecture is frozen music.” That’s a hoary salon witticism attributed to Goethe: the not especially interesting point is that both music and architecture have rhythms and ratios. The implication is not that music has been controlled by being frozen in place. The remark has always been a lament for, not praise for, architecture. “Make an interesting shape,” Driver commands his staff in another scene, “but try not to break the structure.” This is backwards: no good designer deliberately seeks an interesting shape. Visually interesting—and perhaps even formally beautiful—shapes happen by happy accident when one is trying to make efficient and ethical structures.

 At worst, biomimetic design is Art Nouveau—merely stylistically imitating the round organic forms and bright iridescent colors of plants and fungi and animals—constructed with even more than the usual amount of embodied energy and carbon. And operational expenditures of energy, usually trivial relative to construction, increase in biomimetic design, because like mechanical dinosaurs at Disneyland, it’s expected to move. 3D-printing at architectural scale was for a while strangely fashionable—perhaps because it seemed so futuristic that buildings could, instead of being the work of human hands, be so industrially excreted out of sphincters—but the carbon footprint of this technology remains disqualifyingly higher than most all of what’s come before it.

---

“What if what connects power also stores it?” Driver asks at one point, in a throwaway suggestion to one of his minions. The question encapsulates all the profundity and stupidity of the entire film. The building sector accounts for about a third of global energy and carbon loads, of which some 80 percent is a consequence of construction: material extraction, transportation manufacture, assembly, and eventual demolition and decay; and the rest in operational fuel use. Between 15 and 50 percent of the power generated from fuel—coal, atoms—is lost in connection: that is, by transmission as electrical current down wires (or unusually and cinematically in New Rome/York, steam in tunnels and pipes) from source to use. The existing Midtown of New Rome—even in its perhaps contemptuously murky depiction—would be intricate, complex, full of folkways and memories. As a complex spatial and structural and social system it is always already far more like an organism—behaves far more organistically, like a reef or rainforest canopy ecosystem—than whatever assemblage of swoopy shapes Driver or Oxman might cook up. Not to mention that the existing Midtown amortizes down centuries of lost-cost energy and carbon. Like all of us, it doesn’t require ruination and replacement, it just needs gradually to become ever more itself. Storing energy between its harvest and use, in extractive and high-carbon-footprint artifacts like electrochemical batteries, is inherently wasteful—unless it’s the potential kinetic energy of water on one side of a dam, or perhaps of a nuclear bond inside an atom waiting within a dainty reactor. It’s stupid that what seems to matter in Megalopolis is how it looks, and how the buildings behave like living things, instead of the only two things that really matter: its energy use (high indeed), and how the actual living things within it—people—would live with agency, dignity, density, and delight. A small stadium with a roof like gold tissues—that ain’t it.

The architect Bernard Tschumi has a term for the mutually reinforcing collaboration between designer and user: Event Space. This is where the lie of architecture as a form of control gives way to its potential as a tool of human liberation. The beauty of this kind of eventful happening has nothing to do with appearances, with visually stimulating curves or colors. It often arises from what we might otherwise mistake for the ugly and the boring. From the hybrid, the obsolete, the high-low, the mish-mash, the piebald, the cheap, the dumb, the mute—from the awkward regenerative upcycling and updating of all such inadequate legacy platforms. In this way, Coppola’s film is itself such a thing of beauty—but precisely not of the specific kind of shimmering beauty for which, in its own aesthetics and myths, it makes an explicit case. The beauty of Event Space includes the non-visual beauty of appropriation, improvisation, communication, occupation and every such encounter between design object and design subject. The most usefully designed objects are not those that soothe or stimulate you by their mere appearances, before you use them, but that require and respond to your use in a way that is empowering and surprising. If design has any authority, it is only in this.

Megalopolis was only the third movie I’ve seen in a cinema since the Covid years put me out of the habit. It unspooled before me and a dozen other New Yorkers at a grimy AMC theatre on 3rd Avenue and East 86th Street, in Theatre 1, which was a long walk to the back of the building, mostly empty early on a Saturday night. I proceeded from the dark avenue under scaffolding to the surgically bright, diode-lit lobby, tall and narrow, with unclean gray tiles and red plastic trim. I smelled the timeless scent of popcorn and, leaving the lobby for the warren of corridors further back, felt the aural hush and tactile brush of the shift from tiles to carpet underfoot. And heard booming sounds on the left, explosions and laughter, successively through the heavy doors of Theatres 4, 3, and 2. Then in mostly empty Theatre 1, the soft spectacle—heads, necks, shoulders, leaning and shifting—of other bodies in assembly, all silhouetted against the luminous projection screen. People, still. Trying to do something together. To perform a ritual through spaces at appointed times. In this case, given the considerable length of the movie, at either 6:30 or 10:00 PM. Event Space. Strangers in temporary communion, in the shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy of parallel gazes, addressing together the same mystery. Theatre 1 was awkward, long, and like all the spaces at the 86th Street AMC, narrow. It was L-shaped, likely in order to accommodate an air shaft somewhere invisible above—broadening suddenly in the middle rows, side aisle becoming a center aisle halfway along. There was something architecturally amazing about finding yourself shifted involuntarily from edge to center, as you approached the luminous far wall.

What did we dozen people really see, sitting all together in the dark? All through the very long film, there was intermittently some trick of the light in which glare from the projector skimmed playfully and momentarily along the walls of the rear of the theater, briefly and seemingly selectively caressing the backs of the filmgoers and the floor of the aisle. Light, too, at its impossible speed, stores and connects and propels power. The energy to push those photons across some seventy feet of the AMC Theatre 1 on the Upper East Side would have come from water coursing over Niagara Falls some three hundred miles to the northwest, past one of the state’s two hundred hydroelectric plants; or more likely from burning the Jurassic fossil diatoms inside methane, on a barge that’s been floating near the Gowanus Canal since 1971. Every twenty minutes, the effect returned, similar and different each time. Because the movie was boring I started to just wait and hope for the return of this light. This light that began as ancient sunlight, that was buried and stored in molecular bonds of creaturely carbon for 200 million years, and then returned to light, one Saturday night at the AMC. This light that, for all of—and for only—the time and space it took after leaving the projector, before alighting on the screen to make moving pictures, was so full of power and meaning.

---

If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.