What Is A "Megabuilding"?

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Mega buildings are a staple of futuristic sci-fi, towering over skylines, making you go, "Wow!" Today's video will be looking at what point a huge building might become a mega building, including piling buildings altogether, what makes these massive structures so intriguing, and looking at real places that might meet the definition.

[00:00:24]We'll start with one of the poster boys for mega buildings to give us a nice clear example of one. The mega blocks from the 2012 Dread movie. Here they're vast apartment complexes with a hollow core running from the very top to the very bottom. In the setting, they were built in response to a rapidly growing population and are so big that people can spend their whole lives without leaving one. And the movie is basically the same, entirely set within one called Peach Trees. Cyberpunk 2077 clearly took inspiration from these mega blocks for its own mega buildings. But do they count? They're a lot smaller, but have the same basic layout, were built for similar reasons, and again, people could spend their whole lives living within one thanks to them having all the amenities a person needs. One of them is even the home of the player character.

[00:01:07]Both these and the dread ones don't seem to be entirely self- sustaining, though they may be self-sufficient, an idea we'll get back to later when we talk about archies. Night City has other giant buildings as well, though they are not all the same like the actual named mega buildings are. These massive interconnected amalgamations dominate much of the rest of the city, especially Japan Town and the downtown island. No idea what's going on inside of these, but the exteriors are interesting because they have these weird spaces beneath the giant horizontal sections.

[00:01:37]Walking around an area called the Glenn is certainly an interesting experience because there's brick buildings under a sky made of metal. In a way, it makes you feel like you're also inside the mega building, even though you're not, which is very similar to the Pangu and DSX Human Revolution. This is an immense platform built entirely over the city on Hangsha Island, creating room for the whole second city of Upper Hensha. Just like in Cyberpunk, the massive construction almost completely blocks out the sky for those below, making something as basic as sunlight become a thing just for the rich. These buildings in both games accentuate that gap between the elites and everyone else without saying it outright. There's even more of this going on in 40k's hive cities, but those are part of the archology discussion later on since first we're doing a comparison to what may be real life mega buildings like the bagage towers in Whittier, Alaska. Okay, so the building isn't actually that big, so it's not mega in that sense. But here I say that size is relative because basically the entire population of this small town lives inside of it. There's apartments, a store, a post office, and a church alongside other amenities.

[00:02:42]There's even a school connected via a tunnel. So like with the fictional mega blocks, the building's inhabitants can live entirely within it. I can see that being pretty nice during the Alaskan winter, though I imagine being stuck inside all the time can also feel pretty depressing. There's some other buildings around the world that are kind of similar but are also mega in scale like the biggest apartment building in the world by capacity. Up to 30,000 people can live in the Regent International Center in China. Over 100 times more than the population of Whittier. Yep, this one is definitely a mega building.

[00:03:14]And it also has enough amenities that someone could theoretically also spend their whole life within it if they could put up with the density of course and the feeling of being cut off from the outside world. Because unlike Wittia up in Alaska, this one is smack dab in the middle of a normal city. A different way to construct something like this is to go down rather than up, digging into the earth to use it as protection or to hide away from prying eyes. This could be the vaults in Fallout or some giant facility like Aperture Science or the Ruby Mountain Superructure. But despite the similarities in scale, these underground facilities have an entirely different feeling to a mega building on the surface, even if they're of a similar scale. Maybe it's because digging is subtractive rather than additive, even though emptying and then filling the space is technically more work.

[00:04:01]Something to ponder there. Maybe it's as simple as them not being as visually impressive from the outside. Speaking of Fallout vaults, one very important feature they must have is to be fully self- sustainable. They have to be in order to survive through and after an apocalypse. Sometimes total self- sustainability can also apply to mega buildings. But it doesn't need to go that far. It can just be some level of self-sufficiency, at which point it could be considered to be an archeology.

[00:04:27]A word mixing architecture and ecology together in a massive structure designed to reduce its impact on the world around it. This could be by generating its own power or even being entirely separate, able to produce even the food and air that its inhabitants require. The first time I'd heard archology was in relation to those funnyl looking big buildings from Sim City, a game I barely interacted with as a kid, but those buildings stuck with me. A trend that's continued today with mega buildings in general. In particular, I associate the term archology with some of the gargantuan concepts that cropped up in Japan in the 80s and '9s as a response to wildly increasing land prices. Things like the kilometer tall Shimizu Mega City Pyramid, 2 km tall Sky City 1, and 4 km tall exceeded 4,000. If you ever watched Pat Labour the movie, and you should, it's good. So is the second one.

[00:05:20]The Big Ark being constructed in Tokyo Bay is a great fictional example of this idea. Though, since the real concepts were never actually built, are they also fictional? Going up further in scale, we get back to Warhammer 40k's hive cities, which are quite far from the optimistic ideal of the archeology while still also counting as one. The biggest of these can even visibly cover large portions of a planet's surface. Hive Tersium in Dark Tide is great for experiencing the scale of these edififices because the sky is just more of the hive on a mind-bogglingly ludicrous scale compared to the Pangu or Cyberpunk's buildings from earlier. Like here is far away and still allencompassing. Really does a great job making you feel like a tiny meaningless little dot. Perfect for the positioning of the characters you play as in the setting as a whole really. But it is so big that you start questioning if the buildings you visit are part of the mega building or just built on it, like barnacles on a ship. And this question only gets more relevant when going even bigger. What about covering the entire planet and making it an ecumenopous? How do we build that over a long time? Where do the raw materials come from? Somewhere. How do we feed everyone on a planet spanning cityscape with difficulty, I imagine. But these aren't meant to be practical. They're meant to be cool. And they are. But these also do sit in a blurry area because are they really a mega mega building or just a conglomerate of normal mega buildings like in real life?

[00:06:45]Cowoon, Wall City, and Hong Kong was an extremely dense block of apartments all connected together. Does this count as one thing or many? What about New York and the Fifth Element? There's more separation between the buildings, but they're still interconnected in a style that resembles many older visions of future cities from like the 1920s and 30s. Also, look, I finally found a way to work Metropolis into a space dog video. What do you think? Do buildings that merge count as one mega building or not? What about interconnected ones? And if so, how connected do buildings need to be before they do count as one thing?

[00:07:20]I hinted at it earlier with some of the underground facilities, but surface mega buildings also don't always need to be used for residential purposes. They might be vast blocks of industry, like the huge buildings used to create the largest passenger aircraft or rockets, or places meant to exert control over the area around them, like HalfLife 2's Citadel. Maybe they're just monuments to the ego of the ultra wealthy, as seen in Bladeunner 2049, or the real life failure that was the line. Despite the dull reality of many of these enormous buildings, there's still something alluring about the fictional ones.

[00:07:55]Massive, implausible buildings that fill up the sky are pure fantasy and wonderful because of it. And even big, boring apartment blocks are kind of interesting in their own way due to the scale.

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