Gregarious space, uncertain grounds, undisciplined bodies The Soviet Avant-Garde and the 'Crowd' Design Problem

This thesis proposes a theoretical framework for spatial inquiry into radical gregariousness through probing the Crowd Design Problem in the work of the Soviet Rationalist architects (1920s--30s).;Posed as situated forms of coalescence, the crowd construct renders possible spatial questions about Architecture's political import. Legitimizing crowd as an index of collective consciousness, and examining the early-modern revolutionary crowd's historical struggles for spatially evoking and proclaiming its selfconsciousness, this thesis investigates the interwar political phenomenon of amassing large crowds within the 'building' artifact as the medium for constructing mass social relations. The Crowd Design Problem is exemplified by the Palace of Soviets competition (Moscow 1931--3), where revolutionary politics closely attended radical architectural questioning.;The research project is divided into two main parts. The first problematizes the nature of an architectural problem. Arguing the competition brief inadequate to indepth formulation, the thesis posed three primary sources for the crowd design problem: revolutionary mass events, theatre and art. Spatial-construct provided a necessary scaffold for describing the design problem spatially, based on which the Crowd Design Problem was formulated in terms of four components each seeking legitimacy in the mass of crowd-bodies: i) Crowd organization sought configurations of classless collectivity within the crowd's mass events, formulating the Conviviality Matrix (comprising categories of co-presence, co-awareness, equivalence and others, based on Space-Syntax Theory's' generic functions and E. Goffman's Interaction Order), ii) the kinesthetic space conception (after theatrical director V.E. Meyerhold's Biomechanics, and complemented by R. Laban's Effort-Shape Theory) drew on the rhythmic choreographies of mass acting; iii) complementing this crowds morphology, the problem of the object within a spatial-field of crowd-bodies was posed in terms of legitimacy and evoked consciousness; and iv) frameworks for 'seeing' crowds from immersive viewpoints sought to counteract pre-revolutionary representational filters of antagonistic class privilege.;Part-II articulates the logic of the Soviet avant-garde architects' response to such problematics. What this thesis has unearthed, particularly in the Soviet Rationalists' work, is a logic of space-making founded in the construction of intersubjective states of gregarious consciousness radically different from (then as now) prevailing individualistic conceptions of social space. Additionally, arguments evolved methodological tools and conceptual structures decisively partial to gregariousness. Thus, as the primary finding of this research project, I propose Gregarious Space: a theoretical framework of spatial inquiry into what Marx called "species-being", taking radical gregariousness, or gregariousness as the primary condition of society, as its generative principle, and which proffers spatial methodological tools for the description, explanation and interpretation of collectives. Besides drawing on morphological principles, social theory, historical analyses and philosophical reflections, it is particularly amenable to design propositions.;In this theoretical framework, the Rationalists' design-proposition of curved-grounds, textured co-visibilities, dense notations, body choreographies, and empathetic graphic conventions---all comprise a founding spatial-principle trafficking in rhythmic fields between subjects and non-commodified objects: which precedes the material domain of Productivist Constructivism and which challenges Historical Materialist constructs of alienation. It advances the logic of an aleatory gregarious space which subverts prevailing modernist disciplinary techniques of Panopticon inspection, but such that its uncertain kinesthetics sustain dynamic states of collective consciousness. Armed with principles, constructs and parameters developed in this thesis, the Gregarious Space Framework structures its future inquiry.