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Architectural Theory Review

ISSN: 1326-4826 (Print) 1755-0475 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ratr20

Architecture and the Spectre of the Crowd

Cameron Logan & Janina Gosseye

To cite this article: Cameron Logan & Janina Gosseye (2019) Architecture and the Spectre of the Crowd, Architectural Theory Review, 23:2, 171-177, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2019.1675228

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2019.1675228

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EDITORIAL

Architecture and the Spectre of the Crowd

Cameron Logana and Janina Gosseyeb

aUniversity of Sydney; bETH Zurich

On May 29, 1985, there was a slow moving but devastating and destructive collision between architecture and the crowd at the Heysel football stadium in Brussels (Belgium). About one hour before the kick-off of the 1985 European Football Cup final, Liverpool fans breached the fence and overpowered the police line that separated their section from that of the supporters of the rival team, Juventus. What ensued was pandemonium, a clash with fatal results. Thirty-nine people died and six hundred more were injured. Most died from suffocation, after tripping or being crushed against the wall of the football stadium, before a part of this same wall collapsed, relieving the pressure and allowing those trapped inside the building’s confines to escape.

The Brussels police and emergency services took much of the blame for their ineffective and ultimately insensitive response to the altercation (they allowed the match to proceed while 39 corpses lay strewn in the car park). But neither does architecture emerge unscathed from this sad story. Even if poor organisation had placed the rival football fac- tions too close to one another, it was the failure of architecture—the collapse of a wall— rather than its clever design or carefully organised plan of egress that prevented more casualties.

Architecture has an ambivalent relationship with crowds, which is compellingly expressed in the sequence of events that occurred at the Heysel stadium. First, there was the build-up of crowd enthusiasm ahead of the game: the gathering of fans, the almost ritu- alistic taunting of the opposing teams. Then there was the disaster: the upsurge of the angry mob, the crashing of bodies in space, the collapse of a wall, closely followed by the thrilling spectacle of the football match—a cynical act of appeasement by the responsible authorities. To, finally, the joy of the Juventus team and its supporters upon winning the final. Taking place in a time-span of only a few hours, this chain of events reveals the potential duality embedded in architecture designed for crowds: from gathering cheerful troupes to harbour- ing an angry mob, from facilitating mass spectacle to enabling mass disaster.

The potential of architecture to encourage crowd formation as well as to induce crowd dispersal, and its ability to serve as a backdrop for momentous and joyous occasions as well as a setting for mass hysteria and trauma, has resulted in a complex relationship with the phenomenon of the crowd. When crowd theory and historiography flourished in the 1960s, some writers drew explicit connections with architecture. In his famous treatise Crowds and Power, the Bulgarian �emigr�e writer Elias Canetti, for instance, describes architecture’s ability to shape and harness the power of crowds:

[The closed crowd] establishes itself by accepting its limitation. It creates a space for itself which it will fill. [ … ] The entrances to this space are limited in number, and only these entrances can be used; the boundary is respected whether it consists of stone, of

CONTACT Cameron Logan [email protected] � 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW 2019, VOL. 23, NO. 2, 171–177 https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2019.1675228

solid wall [ … ]. The boundary prevents disorderly increase, but it also makes it more difficult for the crowd to disperse and so postpones its dissolution. In this way the crowd sacrifices its chance of growth, but gains in staying power. [ … ] The building is waiting for them; it exists for their sake [ … ]. The space is theirs, even during the ebb, and in its emptiness it reminds them of the flood.1

And yet, to this day, architectural theorists and historians have remained markedly, almost conspicuously, quiet on the subject. This themed issue on “Architecture and Crowds” begins to redress this oversight. It highlights several interesting intersections between architecture and crowds—from the physicality of architecture and crowds to the politicisation of architecture for crowds—and thus proposes different pathways for fur- ther research.

The Physicality of the Crowd

Canetti begins his treatise Crowds and Power by highlighting the human aversion to being touched unexpectedly. We avoid contact wherever possible, he suggests, and when uninten- tional contact with other people does occur it draws the most spontaneous and quickest apologies. But crowd situations reverse this aversion. “It is only in a crowd,” Canetti asserts, “that man can become free of his fear of being touched.”2 Indeed for Canetti the true crowd is signified by our ability to no longer notice the identity of the person who presses against us. “As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.”3

In Canetti’s account, therefore, the crowd is the suspension of our basic aversion to touching strangers. Crowd situations thus drive increased density and contact. But the Heysel stadium tragedy in Brussels, as well as the Hillsborough disaster in the United Kingdom, and other crowd tragedies besides, also highlight the catastrophic limits of crowd density and architectural or spatial confinement.4 Modern urban planning and architecture has been deeply concerned—preoccupied even—with the proper distribution of bodies in space. Hygienic separation of patients in hospitals and clinics, and of pupils in schools, smooth circulation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic in cities and the free flow of air have in various ways been at the centre of architecture’s effort to enhance and secure life and ameliorate the physical dangers and apparent frustrations of crowding. Even in the venues specifically designed for crowds this tendency toward appropriate separation is evident. In his recent twentieth-century history of stadiums in the United States, Benjamin Lisle high- lights the overall tendency toward the provision of ever larger seats and envelopes of space for individuals, while other recent work on stadium design, especially the how-to literature, understandably focuses on the safe, efficient circulation (and especially egress) of the crowd as a whole.5

The tension, therefore, between encouraging and enabling the crowd on one hand and limiting its crowd-like features on the other has been a central theme of modern architec- ture and planning. Several of the papers in this issue of ATR address this tension directly. In their paper “Architecture and Crowd-less Streets,” Emily Brink and William Taylor high- light an exemplary instance, turning our attention to Pierre Patte’s idealised section of an eighteenth-century Parisian street. While the overt subject of the Patte drawing is the inte- gration of dwelling places, street and underground services—while depicting no crowd, or rather no people at all—the authors argue that “[t]hrough its emphasis on nothingness, Patte’s street section emerges as a site of orderly urban potential, promising that crowds can be can both contained and rationally understood.” In other words, Patte’s empty street is an invitation to the crowd, but one that is conceived as hygienic and spatially ordered.

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In all of the papers published in this issue, crowds are evoked using natural metaphors, especially those connected with water. Crowds ebb and flow, they come in waves and floods or as a “human stream.” Stephen Walker’s paper on the spatial logic of English fairground crowds attends to these natural metaphors with great care. Applying assemblage theory to his fieldwork observations, Walker also evokes a wider range of spatial and material meta- phors to describe how fairground attractions and the plans in which they are arranged serve to structure their crowds. Building on an idea that appears in Canetti he describes the individual attractions at the fairground as crowd crystals and analyses crowd formation by reference to “involvement contours,” “cacophony” and “intercalary elements.” The paper carefully details the dynamics of crowd movement and interactions not only as a set of human dynamics, but in a way that takes seriously the role of non-human agents such as the rides and the fairground plan in moulding and distributing the fairground crowd.

Louisa Iarocci’s paper, which focuses on North American department stores as genera- tors and embodiments of the urban crowd, also goes beyond the customary crowd meta- phors of flood and tide. She evokes a more static and monumental image of the crowd. Iarocci quotes American essayist Gerald Stanley Lee, writing in Atlantic Monthly in 1901, who describes a tall commercial building as a “statue of a crowd.” Iarocci argues that the new landscapes of the American downtown in this period, with their proliferating depart- ment stores and other tall buildings, were an architectonic representation or expression of the crowd.

Naturally, department store owners tended to encourage a positive vision of their build- ings that associated them with orderly commerce and social progress. But other observers were concerned by seeing a sort of madness or delirium in the crowds unleashed by con- sumer desire and the great palaces of consumption that drove demand for goods. Whether one associates the department stores with madness or civilised progress, Iarocci’s paper makes clear that their growth and the process of urbanisation on which they depended were inextricably linked, at that time, with crowds and crowding. Moreover, architecture in many ways became the most durable expression and representation of urban crowding, a phenomenon otherwise quixotic and fluid.

Architecture and the Politicised Crowd

According to Canetti national identity is defined through shared crowd symbols. The French, he contends, are bound together by the symbol of revolution, their national identity tied up with the crowd that stormed the Bastille; the Swiss, in turn, are united by the Alps, the mountains that crowd around them; while for the Dutch (in a similar vein) it is the dykes—“[t]he crowd of men equates itself with the dyke and together they withstand the sea”6—and so on.

Many nations (if not all) have at various points in time constructed edifices to unite and strengthen the community that shares such a crowd symbol through the gathering of actual, physical crowds. Stadia are a particularly salient type in this respect because, as the histor- ian of twentieth-century France Robert Lewis points out, they have the unique ability to express political vitality through the hosting of health-based spectacles.7 This was undoubt- edly one of the key motivations of Le Corbusier when in 1936 he proposed to the French government that they construct a Centre National de R�ejouissances Populaires de 100,000 Participants, which is the subject of Toby Mackay and Simone Brott’s paper.

Firmly situated within the 1930s political climate, Le Corbusier’s stadium embodies the contemporary obsession with spectacle and mass gathering by the authoritarian and anti- parliamentarian groups operating, respectively, on both the left and the right side of the

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political spectrum. However, as Mackay and Brott point out, Le Corbusier’s stadium and its intersection with crowds, politics and national identity should also be understood within a longer historical trajectory. They trace its lineage back to French Revolution, when Etienne- Louis Boull�ee designed his Coliseum (ca. 1782), a 300,000-seat arena for national celebra- tions, which, Boull�ee believed, would be instrumental in maintaining order and morality among French citizens.

For centuries crowds have formed for political purposes or been used politically. As such, the architecture that facilitates crowd-formation is often perceived as an instrument for political action, or indeed, a handmaiden of political ideology. When in 1985 L�eon Krier published a book on Albert Speer’s plans for Germania—arguably the summum of architec- ture for crowds—it was skewered almost as soon as it hit the stands. The fallacy of this work, scholars argued, was that it had uncoupled architecture from political ideology to set up a narrative on neoclassicism. This demonstrates that it is difficult (if not impossible) to dissociate architecture for crowds from its political connotations, which, in turn, makes the- orising such architecture a delicate matter.8

Rather than analysing architecture destined to rally a political crowd, Xusheng Huang’s paper in this issue focuses on urban interventions designed to foster interactions between the state and the crowd. Huang describes how in the 1910s, when the Chinese political sys- tem shifted from an imperial to a republican structure, a central axis was created in Beijing by opening up the formerly enclosed ceremonial gate-yards of Tiananmen, Daqingmen, and Zhengyangmen. This intervention made it possible to pass from one side of the city to the other, and broke the rigorous hierarchy of the gate-yards, which embodied the former imperial authority. The new axis introduced the western concept of urban squares to China to express openness and democracy; ideas upon which the new political authority of the Beiyang government was founded.

In addition to signifying openness and democracy, Beijing’s new urban axis also gave the Beiyang government the opportunity to express its power by staging political spectacles, such as military parades and public celebrations. It also, however, confronted the newly minted government with the flip-side of “open” and “democratic” urban space, which allows for the formation of what Canetti calls “open crowds” that form beyond (or in opposition to) state control: “the openness which enables it to grow is, at the same time, its danger.”9 Beijing’s new, modern squares soon became the focal point of grassroots political protests. Following the 1919 May 4th Movement, dozens of student demonstrations, for instance, took place on Tiananmen Square, and only 6 months later, on November 29 and December 7, tens of thousands of students staged anti-Japanese protests.

In recent months, similar open crowds have been engulfing Hong Kong. Following the government’s proposal of a bill that would allow local authorities to detain and extradite people who are wanted in territories with which Hong Kong does not have extradition agreements, hundreds of thousands crowded Hong Kong Airport, as well as various stra- tegic places throughout the city, in protest. Grabbing the headlines of newspapers and other media outlets across the globe, these protests were far more high-profile than those of the crowds of Hong Kong’s foreign domestic workers who have been peacefully protesting on the city’s streets for years on end.

Every Sunday, Filipino women, who spend six days a week as live-in aides in their employers’ homes, with little to no private space, set up temporary and make-shift domestic spaces in Hong Kong’s elevated walkways, underpasses, atriums, laneways and stairways, in a phenomenon that has become known as “Little Manila.” In her paper “The Spatialities of Little Manila,” Evelyn Kwok describes how the actions of these disenfranchised women defy Canetti’s simple categorisation as either an “open” or “closed” crowd, instead

174 EDITORIAL

oscillating between the two as they carve out a space of resistance for themselves in Hong Kong’s crowded urbanity.

Very specific urban and architectural settings in Hong Kong have shaped the weekly rit- uals of these Filipino women as well as the recent spate of mass demonstrations. While the foreign domestic workers make tactical use of the city’s connective tissue—its open atria, walkways and laneways—the extradition-bill-protesters have targeted the city’s key organs, places of strategic economic importance, such as the airport. Nevertheless, both groups have made a virtue of tactical fluidity and have embraced the idea that protest crowds should, in the words of the protest organisers, “be water.”10 So, the fabric and form of the city is vital to the resistance of both groups, and the Hong Kong authorities have been unable to use architecture and urban design as a response, even if these spatial tools have been deployed very explicitly in the past as a means to diminish the opportunities for insur- rection and tactical resistance to state authority.

The most famous example of architectural and urban interventions designed to project state power and facilitate crowd dispersal can be found in Paris. In the nineteenth century, fearing the power of the revolutionary crowd that brooded in the city’s crooked mediaeval streets—a crowd which had already shown itself capable of storming the Bastille—Napoleon III ordered Baron Haussmann to redesign the city in such a way that its urban layout would exert state authority and effectuate crowd control. Haussmann’s urban interventions, along with their effects, were eloquently described by the American writer Mark Twain:

He [Haussmann] is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble boulevards as straight as an arrow—avenues which a cannon ball could traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible than the flesh and bones of men—boulevards whose stately edifices will never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented revolution breeders. [ … ] The mobs used to riot there, but they must seek another rallying point in future.11

However, such extensive urban reformations take years, if not decades. In this sense architecture and urban design might be viewed as a kind of slow politics.

Conclusion

In James C. Scott’s influential account of state power individuation and separation are premises for the state being able to “see” and, therefore, govern populations. Irrespective of the impossibility of being able to see the population in any total sense, according to such an account the modern state would logically oppose the formation of crowds. After all, the crowd resists, at a fairly basic level, the logic of individuation and separation.12

And yet state authorities, whether municipal or national, continue to invest resources in places for crowds. Crowds are vital to the kinds of spectacle and political baiting beloved of demagogues and political “strongmen.” But even under more seemingly benign political arrangements associated with liberal democratic traditions large gatherings at stadiums and in public places are encouraged as healthy expressions of citizenship. Add to this the inter- est of real estate capital, retailers and others for whom a certain density of commercial transaction provides a highly charged motor for incidental urban crowds. There are clearly powerful forces promoting crowd formation which might counteract or undermine the apparent logic of individuation that is central to the operations of the modern state. In this tendency of individuals to want to join crowds and in the willingness of state authorities

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and other powerful forces to encourage crowd situations there seems to be a tacit acknow- ledgement that collective experience is potentially transformative.

The difficulty for architecture in acknowledging this transformative quality of crowd experience is twofold. The first is a technical and procedural problem: even if an architect or urban designer is interested in and inclined to highlight the powerful potential of places for crowds, a whole host of well-intentioned building and urban planning regulations is likely to constrain any project that promotes the propinquity of the crowd rather than ena- bling physical separation. The second problem is more political. Architectural and urban projects are typically undertaken on behalf of those with money and power. As such the political resonances of crowd-oriented projects are generally going to be read as serving power more than liberation or transformation.

This is where historical and theoretical scholarship on architecture and the built envir- onment has a role to play. The essays in this issue highlight the great range of political and social situations in which architecture and urban design have shaped crowd experience. From great commercial edifices to politically symbolic urban spaces and tactically modified leftover space, architecture and infrastructure provides the very ground on which, and the space in which, crowds form. Such scholarship allows us to see the problem in an expanded field. The essays here have only just begun to scratch the surface.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Cameron Logan is Director of Heritage Conservation and Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.

Janina Gosseye is a Senior Assistant in the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH, Zurich.

Notes

1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: The Noonday Press, 1984), 17. This book was originally published in German in 1960, and was first translated to English in 1962.

2. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 15. 3. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 15. 4. Hillsborough Independent Panel (for the House of Commons), Hillsborough: The Report

of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (London: The Stationary Office, 2012), https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 229038/0581.pdf

5. Benjamin D. Lisle, Modern Coliseum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

6. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 172. 7. Robert Lewis, The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern

France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 8. Leon Krier, Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 (Brussels: Archives d’architecture

moderne, 1985). 9. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 16.

176 EDITORIAL

10. Erin Hale, “‘Be Water’: Hong Kong Protesters Adopt Bruce Lee Tactic to Evade Police Crackdown,” Independent, June 21, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ asia/hong-kong-protest-latest-bruce-lee-riot-police-water-a9045311.html

11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Penguin 2007, 1869), 113.

12. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

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