To every rise and fall of nations, crowds were vital. They could appear in the form of armies defending their motherlands or revolutionaries rewriting the courses of history, but they are also vital to political baiting beloved by every ‘big guy’. Crowds also bring in life to the masses; it is the various social spectacles that we (occasionally) attend to feel recharged and alive, connected by the warmth human relationship provides and the sense of belonging manifested therein. A politicised crowd likewise need not have a political agenda to address nor does it always entail a revolutionary goal; both dominance and resistance can too be accidental by-products of such accumulation. The question of crowding being truly democratic and its capacity to remain as a simple social event is, however, still open to debate.

To what extent can architecture embrace the transformative qualities of crowding and crowd flow?

I therefore aim to intervene at Porte d’Aix and return the life the various masses once embraced, ergo the title The Revolution of the Roundabout: The Arch as the Spectacle between Function and Deactivation. I intend to investigate the tension between endorsing and harnessing crowd formation on the one hand and crowd control on the other for I concluded that it is the focal dilemma of modern architecture and planning. It is in this propensity of the mass to crowd and tendency of (state) authorities to encourage crowd formation where there appears to be a tacit acknowledgement of the transformative nature of collective experience.