Since it was uploaded last summer Jonathan Gales’ short film Megalomania ¹ has aroused fascination with its protagonists, a city and its architecture portrayed as an incommensurable and immobile construction site. A truly post-humanist product, Megalomania’s unfurling of Piranesian scenes allows one to grasp the failure of a certain form of contemporary architecture to serve the needs of the city in an era of sustainable development. Over the last decades urban planning, for a long time practiced on a human scale, has become the business of increasingly autocratic and ever less democratic town planners, who insist on constructing iconic buildings to satisfy the voracious appetite of an unbridled capitalism.

The history of architecture is marked by bigness: from the pyramids to the Palatine Hill dwellings; from the great wall of China to the Château of Versailles; from the universal exhibition palaces to the post-World War II housing blocks or corporate mega-towers. Though gigantism was for many centuries an expression of monumentality,² it has represented, and still represents political and economic power, and massive population growth.³ It has, and still generates a utopia of mega-structures and artificial topography, such as Yona Friedman and Constant Anton  Nieuwenhuys ⁴ proposed more than fifty years ago; the symbolic and iconographic force of these concepts endures and to this day continues to transcend the imagination, taking shape materially in the discourse of globalization and virtually in digital architecture.

This architectural and urban bigness would thus be (in the light of Chomsky’s

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