It erupted as a primal scream from a frazzled-looking conventioneer leaning against a wall, hair askew, punctuated by a complaint repeated by others in corridors and grand spaces: “Get me out of here!” Not everyone felt it; many, if not most, reveled in the mix. Still, some visitors to the rousingly successful AIA National Convention, which attracted a record number (24,500) to its positive energy, experienced a type of sensory overload and psychological distress. Their discomfiture bears scrutiny, since the source of their collective angst lies embedded in architecture.
The problem, in a word, is Big. It makes some of us, like the distressed visitor, lose our emotional cool. The occasional human reaction to excessively fulsome crowds and sizable spaces has a big name for a real condition—agoraphobia. In its classic sense, the term refers to the fear of open spaces. Related to claustrophobia, it breeds in gigantic enclosures, and includes phobias centered on crowds, shops, and public places; psychologists describe one operable variant as the fear of shopping malls. Fueled by large milling crowds, it can produce a kind of nameless panic, exacerbated by hermetic environments such as the typical humongous Las Vegas casino/hotel/convention complex, where visible exits to air and sunlight are remote, few, and hard to find.
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