In a memorable scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) the hero visit a high-end restaurant. When his food is brought to him, he discovers to his horror that the material and phantasmatic dimensions of reality have drifted apart from each other, and the image of the delightful meal that he had selected from the menu now floats freely above the excremental mass upon his plate. Looking up, he can see that the same is the case for everyone else. But they seem oblivious to the fact and dig into their meals with gusto.

Something similar can be observed in the design studios of certain Ivy League universities and in the extravagant biennials of Europe's finest cities, where fabulous urban imaginaries are ravenously consumed with scant regard for their relation to brute materiality. The following tale is told from the perspective of the protagonist in Brazil, looking across not a dinning table but a drafting table to a distant jungle in which a gap has suddenly opened between an urban fantasy and the Real of Capital.