Found a short AVI file while cleaning our archives. It's from Crowd IT, a utility tool for 3d Studio Max that can simulate very large crowds, thereby allowing you to make your computer generated landscapes, cities, and buildings seem more realistic, if so desired.





Probably there are better crowd-rendering tools out there, but for now, we are more interested in this particular movie and its complete lack of context. There is simply the crowd, following some sort of external parameters imposed by the designer, creating patterns and timelines.

And so we wonder: can you create a park without its accoutrements — no shrubs, no benches, no paths, no water features — but simply the pageantry of mass psychology? No tectonic elements to program activities or direct traffic, only a flat terrain and its mass ornament, self-organizing (or even self-destructing) under its own internal logic.





Or do they already exist? Are streets in a way already a parkless park? How about prison courtyards — where the built environment always plays secondary to group dynamics? People-watching as if your life depends on it, and it does.


(The prisonless prison in THX 1138 by George Lucas.)

Lastly, what will the crowd actually do in a real parkless park? What Busby Berkeley musical formations will thousands of people enact? And what would happen if I throw in a screaming man infected with Avian flu? Or confect a scene in which an al-Qaeda cell finds itself in the company of a pack of Texans? How about a pedophile or two? Would the crowd keep its distance or swarm around and stone them to death? Or how about a zombie?

In the Archives:
Counting Crowds

Future Tense:
The Parkless Park Resurfaces