It's legendary how architectural lectures can be incredibly boring.
I think if I would have started BIG in America, I would probably never have called it BIG. There was nothing but a little bit of local small country humor in the idea.
All evidence shows that we are actually getting smarter. Roughly we are getting 10 IQ points smarter every decade. The speed of innovation is also faster.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
We can engineer a building and design a building with least reliance on active machinery to make it inhabitable.
Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be. They are what they are because that's how we made them.