The crowd and its architecture

Abstract

This paper asks about the possibility of an architectural genre associated with crowds. That genre would agglutinate building types serving the functions human masses demand when they are presented as a compact unit, both in static states and in movement. A problem arises derived from what is the space in which the crowd defines itself. Sciences concerned with the analysis of human masses have neglected the spatial component of the phenomenon of crowds. A whole Psychology has been built to study the relationship between the human masses and the agents of power. A recognizable and wellstudied architecture is produced from the action of totalitarian powe. Although these families of buildings, already present in ancient architectural cultures, are only one chapter in an even more extensive corpus. Being modernity the age of the crowds, there are some buildings of modern architecture that join those families. Those buildings in which the crowd was not subjected to a merely instrumental treatment.