What must be built in order for people to come together? And once they do—what does that architecture make of them?
Of Measures and Masses approaches these questions through a radically realist endeavour: to stop unseeing what is so evidently still all around us. Unfolding across a single, allegorical day that spans continents, the film navigates architectures that are neither strictly functional nor purely symbolic—spaces designed to summon, contain, and orchestrate human presence on a mass scale. Whether sacred or secular, monumental or makeshift, these large-scale spatial constructs operate as fictions that regulate the forms of togetherness in an essential act: the invitation to assemble.
From mosques to motor rallies, from sanctuaries to fairgrounds, each site reveals a distinct choreography of movement, belief, and visibility.
These spaces, though built for a community, emerge from negotiation—between emergent collectives seeking symbolic recognition and established powers providing the means for its expression, so long as the gesture remains symbolic. Of Measures and Masses traces how such environments govern the appearance, disappearance, and circulation of the crowd, shaping not only how people gather, but what kind of public they become in the act of gathering.
What emerges is not a typology, rather a constellation: spaces imagined, inherited, or improvised—structures that stage presence, orchestrate collective rhythms, and momentarily give shape to something resembling a public.