The Future Is a City: <i>Megalopolis</i> and Why Architecture Matters to Sci-Fi

Bear with me for just a minute—I swear this will wrap around to being about sci-fi:

In July of 1925, the city of Paris hosted a world’s fair. The “International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts” (or Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes) was a celebration of new—fully new! Unencumbered by the constraining sensibilities of tradition—artistic styles. “Modern” art, rather than being simply contemporary and novel, sought to reflect two major, watershed changes in society: the urbanization of American and European populations, and the broadening societal accessibility of technology, both of which were fundamentally reshaping the forms of day-to-day life. For this new age of advancement, a new aesthetic.

Among the pavilions erected by the different attending nations, showcasing their national modern architectural styles and cultural ethos, were also the entries of individual designers and studios. One entry among these, the pavilion of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, stood out at the time, and in posterity, as the most controversial and by the same token the most exceptional. Other pavilions were lavish in their forms and use of decoration. The pavilion of L’Esprit Nouveau was by contrast, or possibly even without contrast, spare. A double-height interior of white walls, hung with cubist paintings, and furnished with built-in cabinets and industrially mass-produced chairs and tables. The main flight of fancy was a terrace with a hole built into the roof, accommodating a tree growing through it.

Expo officials were aghast, mainly by the display of industrially manufactured, commercially available furnishings inside, though also by the discordant austerity of the whole structure. They had the pavilion fenced off from view until the Ministère des Beaux Arts intervened to have the fence removed.

The pavilion was the project of the Franco-Swiss architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, or simply “Corbu,” the pseudonym he adopted when her founded the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau with Adémée Ozenfant, with whom he advocated for a Purist style of architecture. The simple, accessible, and standardized, Corbu believed, would or ought to be the way of modern living, optimized after the modernist maxim of form following function. Or, as Corbu put it more poetically, “The house is a machine for living in.”

Reflecting on the Paris Expo controversy, Corbu declared:

Certainly, we must hold Corbu’s proclamation to have proven true, on balance. The appeal of novelty is so often coequal to, if not more important than, practical application in the advertisement of any new product. Yet the inertia (or call it momentum) of tradition still holds sway too. For such reasons, the most ambitious of Le Corbusier’s dreams were never realized. Too disruptive. Advancement happened, yes, and three cheers for penicillin and refrigerators! But mostly, infrastructure was built in service of the interests of already powerful and influential classes.

Almost a century on later, in the first teaser trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new sci-fi epic Megalopolis, an architect teeters on the lip of a skyscraper—the Chrysler Building, briefly the tallest building in the world in 1930 and masterpiece of the style that takes its name from that same 1925 Paris Expo, Art Deco—and yells at time to stop.

It does.

Having premiered at Cannes in May and set for a wide release in September, the themes and premise of Coppola’s new film appear to be rooted in something of an old sci-fi chestnut: the society hovering between stagnation and collapse, on the one hand, and precipitous transformation on the other. This one is set in an unnamed city—call it Schnew York—the fate of which pivots around the genius of a visionary architect, Cesar Catilina (played by Adam Driver), whose ambitions to rebuild the city, following some destructive disaster (the trailer implies that to be the debris of a satellite falling to earth), are opposed by its corrupt mayor (Giancarlo Esposito).

That common thread’s appearance here is no great mystery, since Coppola highlights, among a vast bricolage of influences listed in an interview with Vanity Fair, the strong impression left on him by the H.G. Wells-penned 1936 science fiction film Things to Come. Wells’ oeuvre, the most famous works in which were written just before the turn of the century, is suffused with anticipation, both hopeful and wary, over how social and technological development would reshape society. Also, strong socialist sentiments. We’ll get back to that.

The anxiety that Wells tapped into, that Coppola emulates, is the same one that drove the proliferating popularity of science fiction—and is bound up with the same ambitious sense of possibility that inspired architects like Le Corbusier. 1926, just a year after the Paris Expo, saw the launch of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories by Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Awards are named), in whose pages the works of authors like Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jules Verne, were republished and rediscovered by popular audiences. The unifying feature of modernism and science fiction as a genre, contemporary trends that they were, is the sense that Big Change is possible.

It is fitting, then, that on the near-centennial of the Paris Expo and Amazing Stories, milestones of sci-fi and architecture reunite in Coppola’s latest offering. So too is it a timely opportunity to check in with the state of modernity and futurity. Our reactions to Megalopolis might serve as a barometer of our feelings on certain questions, namely: Do the ambitions of the early 1900s still resonate now—and if not, is it because we have outgrown some cultural naivete or because we have lost our taste for big change? Fundamentally, what is the status of the “progress” that Corbu and Wells so savored? Have we stopped time or forged ahead?

If science fiction is still running on the fumes of modernism, perhaps it is because that period still feels the most freighted with potential for transformation. Part of Megalopolis’ sci-fi premise is the genius architect’s invention of a new building material, “Megalon,” that is advertised to grow organically with its inhabitants. The concept appears to be represented in the trailers by great whirling, spiraling structures, curving organically around the cityscape’s blocky skyscrapers. Somehow, they put me in mind of a big fungus. Or the Guggenheim. The whole concept sounds a bit unwieldy and rather calls into question the need for an architect’s design vision, but never mind that now. As a building technology with the potential to reshape civic space (and with it, it’s implied, civic life), Megalon parallels a real-world engineering innovation: reinforced concrete!

Wait, no, girl, come back!

I know I know, concrete…how riveting. But really: reinforced concrete and the cheapening cost of steel enabled the construction of bigger cities, at once more open, hosting more spacious interiors, and enabling greater population density given their increased verticality. It was a true possibility-expanding advancement as an innovation that sat poised to transform both private and public space.

While the reinforced concrete technology had been in use since the turn of the century—the Ingalls Building, completed in 1903, was the first reinforced concrete-frame skyscraper—it was not until the 1920s and ’30s that skyscrapers began to shoot up and claw at the dome of heaven across American cities. The aforementioned Chrysler Building, steel frame, completed in 1930, remains a model of the Art Deco skyscraper par excellence, referenced across visual art such as Coppola’s film and the cover art for Meatloaf’s 1993 studio album Bat Out of Hell II.

This architectural and stylistic development bled swiftly into the sci-fi imagination. In 1924, German filmmaker Fritz Lang made his fateful trip to New York City and witnessed the new vertical urban landscape that would inspire the design of his own futuristic city in 1927’s Metropolis, another film from which Coppola draws inspiration, with its depictions of bourgeois hedonism in a highly stratified society. The visual reference remains a staple of science fiction, though even when deployed in a future setting, it has begun to feel quaint. The adaptors of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series have actually, cleverly used this to their advantage, rendering the imperial capital world of Trantor steeped in lavish Art Deco design elements to communicate the sense of a society that is at once futuristic and backwards-gazing—a sort of retrofuturism, one could say.

But back in the real world of the 1920s, architects were also busy planning for the non-fiction cities of the future. Inside his L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion, Le Corbusier also displayed his plan for the redesigned cityscape of Paris, the Plan Voisin pour Paris. Eighteen uniform glass skyscrapers grouped near the Seine, just north of the Île de la Cité, and webbed with roads for automobiles (the plan’s sponsor, Gabriel Voisin, was a car manufacturer). Corbu’s Plan Voisin was aimed at resolving issues of urban overcrowding and poor sanitation. Moving the population into tower apartments, spaced generously rather than tightly clustered, and fitted with modern amenities, ventilation, and plumbing, would permit more air and light to permeate the street level where more real estate could be committed to greenery, in order to create a more pleasant and salubrious pedestrian experience. Well, and also the motorways.

Corbu’s plan was not to be, and perhaps that’s for the best when one considers how much of old Paris he would have destroyed to reshape it. Reflecting on Le Corbusier’s career in 1986, William J.R. Curtis criticizes the orderly Plan Voisin for having been probably incapable of rehoming the complex social and economic fabric of Paris that grew up organically on, and thrived on being squashed together in, those cramped and dirty streets. It is an inevitable and intractable problem of social engineering endeavors that, in making blanket provisions for large populations, they try to arrange for the way the people ought to live (in theory) rather than accommodating a branching variety of needs. Le Corbusier, for his part, was apparently undeterred by the authoritarian measures it would have taken to see his plan enacted; in 1940 he spent a period of several months attempting to join the Vichy regime that was organized around the principle of collaboration with Nazi Germany, seemingly hoping that the government would discover him like an ingenue and gladly throw their institutional backing behind his plans.

Even so, Curtis acknowledges that Corbu’s plans possessed merit, namely communitarian touches not realized in the cities that were actually built up at the beginning of the twentieth century:

He prophesied with uncanny precision the building types and transport systems that would dominate in the industrial cityscapes of the future and tried to give them order and the enrichments of nature. However, it would be a little too easy to blame him for every banal modern downtown full of crude high rises surrounded by wildernesses of parking lots. Centralization, real estate profiteering by means of tall buildings, dumb urban renewal, massive traffic scheme cutting through old fabric—surely these would have happened without him. Even in cases where Le Corbusier’s influence has been certain, crucial areas of original theorems—such as private terraces, communal facilities, and parks—have often been left out.¹

The urban planning ills Curtis diagnoses here of course recall the scheme of another of Coppola’s major points of inspiration, the New York urban planner Robert Moses. Moses in the early and mid-twentieth century successfully achieved the level of bureaucratic power that would have made Corbu swoon. Similar to Corbu’s vision for Paris’s “rue corridor,” Moses razed lower- and middle-class neighborhoods to clear room for expressways, connecting suburbanites to the city at the expense of actual, by and large poorer, city-dwellers.

It can be a little dispiriting to look back and recognize that even the humbler utopian aspirations for the machine age mostly never panned out. So, for all that it evokes the Roaring Twenties, the themes Coppola appears to be grasping at in Megalopolis do still feel relevant. How indeed might we design—physically design—a better environment for ourselves when the massive scale of development that would require has in the past proven bureaucratically infeasible on the one hand, or requiring massive overreach on the other?

All at the same time, however, early reviews give the impression that Megalopolis may not be bold or articulate enough about its utopian dreams. As we’ve noted, the futuristic city, of either the utopic or dystopic flavor, is a well-trodden concept, as is the figure of the genius doomed by his own hubris. It is unclear what novelty or revitalizing insight this latest entry will contribute. What do those swirly, apparently self-sustaining Megalon structures represent? Some sort of democratic participation in the urban planning process? The trailers strongly suggest the film is concerned with civil discourse. “When we ask these questions,” Driver’s Cesar states, “when there’s a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.” That’s a nice if rather vague and anemic sentiment, though to be fair, it’s only a trailer. The movie itself could, and hopefully will, put forward more interesting, assertive ideas. But let us prognosticate a little, based on what we do know.

Of all its cinematic and literary precedents, Megalopolis appears most to resemble Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the tale of an intransigent modernist architect, Howard Roark, whose vision is constantly stifled by traditionalists. (In creating Roark, Rand was evidently inspired by Frank Llyod Wright, though Martin Filler opines that the character’s “suffocating megalomania” renders Roark more akin to our Swiss-French urbanist, Le Corbusier.) Also in the mix is the foxy daughter of our protagonist’s rival, played in the 1949 adaptation by Patricia Neal showing a lot of decolletage. Not so much from leading man Gary Cooper. Shame. But her character, Dominique Francon, finds a parallel in Megalopolis’ Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), daughter of Cesar’s political opponent, Cicero.

Again, we who haven’t yet seen the film are in speculative territory—dicey!—but like Dominique, it appears as though Julia plays a mostly metaphorical role in the story, with the fact that she is won over by Cesar, thereby lending him and his ideas a symbolic cachet. If so, it’s a pity. This of course would not any kind of narrative crime; characters behave and function symbolically in storyworld all the time. But observed through the lens of my current fixation, which—thanks for being here, by the way, and coming along on this journey—which this week is modern architecture, it’s a choice that looks like a missed opportunity. Because feminist social reformers of the turn of the century had some radical and specific hopes for the mechanized, urbanized, utopic future society of their own. They even wrote some science fiction about it.

For women, the new material realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offered the opportunity to argue for a change in the divisions of household and professional labor. The place of the kitchen in the modern/future home was often central to these debates, with some proposals for “apartment hotel” complexes eliminating the kitchen as an asset of private apartments entirely, making it instead a communal asset.

The upshot of this design choice was both symbolic and directly practical. Food and the labor of cooking would be a community asset, no longer performed privately and without acknowledgment, with women acting as the de facto domestic servants of their atomized family unit. In the same spirit of efficiency and optimization that generated excitement for modernity more broadly, engineers and scientists such as Ellen Swallow Richards and Mary Hinman Abel, founders of the New England Kitchen, folded proper nutrition into the matter of relieving women of a disproportionate burden of domestic labor. Domestic labor, performed as a career by trained experts, would see not only that communities were fed, but that they ate correctly, though this goal was a little less punctilious than it may sound. Access to cheap, hygienic, and nutritious meals wasn’t something that could be taken for granted at the time.

And while H.G. Wells envisioned the grand spectacle of Martians invading earth, or perhaps genetically modifying humanity, a contemporary futurist novelist, Henry Olerich, wrote in A Cityless and Countryless World about a society of feminist “Marsians” descending to Earth to share with us their enlightened ways. In Marsian communities, gender distinctions were abolished, and Marsians lived in “big-houses” of 1000 occupants wherein childcare was socialized, meals were vegetarian, and cleaning and cooking was attended to by a mixed-gender corps of professionals. Urban historian Dolores Hayden praises Olerich as a standout among male utopian novelists for conceiving of a world in which men split domestic labor with women rather than fictitiously imagining the need for traditional “women’s work” away entirely. But Olerich’s book is yet to be optioned for a major motion picture adaptation.

It is no great wonder that The War of the Worlds has persisted longer in the cultural consciousness than A Cityless and Countryless World. Urban planning and social organization are so prosaic on their own, let alone when held up in comparison to a rip-roaring alien invasion story. Still, as I look ahead to this evening, when I will none-too-efficiently cook a meal for one of dubious nutritional balance, I do feel a genuine kindling of enthusiasm for the futurisms of Ellen Richards and Henry Olerich. (It is mostly localized in the stomach region, but even so.)

It is no great wonder either, and let’s not pretend to be surprised or scandalized, that Coppola draws inspiration more from Wells and Fritz Lang and Ayn Rand and Sallust than the philosophical and speculative writings of material feminism or the filmography of Lizzie Borden. His catalog shows solidly the credentials of a man qualified to make great movies about the foibles of powerful men. As they say, write what you know. And if you would prefer feminist socialist science fiction to a Coppola bacchanalia, you can still watch Born in Flames.

In 1958, in the same spirit as prior World’s Fairs, the United States and USSR arranged for a diplomatic cultural exchange in which Russia would exhibit its technology and art in New York City and the US would do likewise in Moscow, held in June and July of 1959. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon guided Nikita Khrushchev through the American National Exhibition, “dedicated to showcasing the high standard of life in our country,” and the pair fell into an argument over the practicality of newfangled American kitchen devices, an exchange dubbed by history “the Kitchen Debate.” In the shadow of the Soviet success with the Sputnik rocket, Nixon proclaimed the virtues of an American dishwasher to “make life easier for women.” Khrushchev retorted that his capitalist attitude towards women was anathema to communism. Nixon insisted in return that, no, the attitude was universal.

Sarah Archer, reflecting on the incident in her book The Midcentury Kitchen, notes how the exchange demonstrates what was and was not included in American notions of progress: “‘The future’ held robots, automation, style, and ease, but it didn’t promise any changes in domestic gender roles—quite the contrary.”

The conversation around progress today has mostly turned to information infrastructure rather than physical space, revolving around tech monopolies that control the flow of data and speculations about the labor-saving possibilities of “A.I.” The private kitchen is an unquestioned standard, and gendered disparity in who performs housework persists. The matters of urban planning and kitchen politics don’t feel as urgent to us now as they did to Le Corbusier or Ellen Swallow Richards a century ago.

A lot of speculative science fiction, naturally, imagines a future born of circumstances contemporary to its time of composition. That is, it imagines the future of now. As such, retrofuturistic or period piece science fiction stories have a real role to play in expanding our imagination by reinvigorating branches of possibility that were thought dead, the bygone futures we’ve forgotten. Whether Coppola’s own retro vision of the future city will do so remains to be seen, but hope and aspiration—in progress, in Big Change, in the possibilities of storytelling—remains, always, the sci-fi writer and reader’s project.

1. Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, pg. 66 ↩︎