Architects today work in an age where all-embracing visions for the masses appear in the past. Far from being renewed today, those older visions are discredited in favor of more embattled and exclusive political programs. ln fact we seem to be entering a period defending rather than celebrating collective values, demanding battlements and not monuments. It's worth pausing to reflect on the shift this represents, from a time not long ago when the structures built for post offices and railway stations could elevate the spirit as if they were cathedrals, embracing crowds, suggesting always that there was room for more, displaying art and expertise that could exhilarate. These still exist, and where they have not been re.designed and repurposed, they retain their power to uplift. But capital today flows toward airports and malls, where the masses disperse rather than congregate, and w here the discreetly competitive charms of affluence undermine the more elemental pleasure of belonging in a crowd. If architecture today encloses public space and guards against its turning into a collective symbol, or a space for collective uses, the crowd in turn has ways of repurposing built form , conferring public functions upon available objects through insurgent forms of occupation.